I have to present an oral argument in a week for a mock moot court case we\u2019re doing in Legal Skills. It involves a police officer who, while off-duty, beat a man. There are two issues that I must argue. First, whether the court of appeals has jurisdiction to hear the plaintiff\u2019s appeal. Second, whether the officer acted under the color of law. I represent the defendant (police officer) and kind of have my back up against the wall.<\/p>\n
I did a practice oral argument for Legal Skills today. It went OK, but I was nervous and it showed. Apparently, I said, \u201cum,\u201d 51 times in ten minutes. Someone was actually counting. I was advised to reference my case law before the judges do; this will put me on the offensive as opposed to the defensive because I will be able to highlight the stronger analogies. I also need to be less monotone and more detailed, however my pacing was good and I was direct and clear.<\/p>\n
The final question asked of me was, \u201cHow do you arrest an unconscious man?\u201d To which I replied, \u201cI would like to conclude my argument here\u2026\u201d I had no answer\u2026 I froze\u2026 but, now that I\u2019m home I know how to answer it. So, I guess that\u2019s one roadblock I know how to avoid when the real argument comes up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have to present an oral argument in a week for a mock moot court case we\u2019re doing in Legal Skills. It involves a police officer who, while off-duty, beat a man. There are two issues that I must argue. First, whether the court of appeals has jurisdiction to hear the plaintiff\u2019s appeal. Second, whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[349,1157,85,350,348],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law-school-personal-accounts","tag-argument","tag-law-school-personal-accounts","tag-law-school","tag-legal-writing","tag-oral"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":488,"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions\/488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yugflog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}