Faculty Team wins Frankfurt Investment Arbitration Moot competition

A team of students from the Faculty has been successful in winning the 18th Frankfurt Investment Arbitration Moot Court final on 12 June.

The team in Frankfurt comprised Esmée Cadogan (Trinity), Nick Warrier (Churchill), and Harry Staddon (Corpus), and coach Jonathan Teo (Jesus). They were supported throughout their preparation by Wilfred Ong (St Edmund's) and coach Titus Soh (Hughes Hall).

After 4 days of mooting against a field of 32 other teams, the team emerged victorious. In an additional accolade, Esmée was awarded The Best Advocate of the Final and will therefore receive the Aurelius Cotta Scholarship for the Arbitration Academy in Paris.

Responding to the win, Esmée said:

"Winning the Frankfurt Investment Arbitration Moot with the Cambridge team was an incredibly rewarding experience, and I was delighted to be awarded the Best Advocate Prize. It gave me the chance to develop legal research, written advocacy and oral advocacy skills in a demanding international context, and showed me how valuable international mooting can be as a complement to academic study. Preparing written and oral submissions required us to think carefully about legal authority, structure and persuasion, while also engaging with an area of law beyond the ordinary undergraduate curriculum. I am very grateful to my teammates, whose hard work and collaboration made the experience so enjoyable, and I hope Cambridge students will continue to have opportunities to take part in competitions of this kind."

I am very grateful to my teammates, whose hard work and collaboration made the experience so enjoyable, and I hope Cambridge students will continue to have opportunities to take part in competitions of this kind. Esmée Cadogan

The case study was based on the 1916 Black Tom Explosion. The team faced LMU Munich, Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur and Caspian University. In the quarterfinals, the team faced HU Berlin, University of Chicago in the semifinals and LMU Munich again in the finals.

The Frankfurt Investment Arbitration Moot Court is the oldest and most prestigious student competition in the area of investment protection law. Its focus is on the oral presentation of legal arguments before an arbitral tribunal composed of specialists in the field during a one week final event which takes place in June of every year. The competition is unique in that it combines the law of investment protection, one of the most modern and fastest developing areas of international law, with the history of international law and of international trade.