Cambridge team wins Mitchell L. McLean Trial Competition

In March a Cambridge University team comprising Amia Guha (lead counsel) (Trinity), Sherelle Lim (Magdalene), and Leonard Krych (Corpus Christi), travelled to Madrid to compete in the Mitchell L. McLean Trial Competition. The competition is the only American law moot held in Spain, hosted by the European Law Students' Association at IE University in partnership with Pérez-Llorca. Joel Ireland (Trinity) was also an invaluable research member of the team, back in Cambridge.

The competition placed teams inside a fictional US federal criminal case, United States v. Joshua Francis-Dragoș, involving a fatal shooting near the Utah-Arizona state line on land overlapping with the Navajo Nation. The case raised some of the most technically demanding areas of American law: Indian Country jurisdiction, the Major Crimes Act, Public Law 280's displacement of federal criminal jurisdiction, and federal self-defence doctrine.

Cambridge won the trial court round 37 to 36.5 on the strength of a forensic-led defence challenging the government's GPS evidence and corroborating a close-quarters struggle rather than a deliberate killing. In the appellate round, the team argued novel grounds including a Public Law 280 displacement argument and a statutory interpretation point drawn from the MCA's own text - and won the overall competition (by a 0.7 mark margin). The Cambridge Team also won the Best Brief award.