Course Section | Columbia Law School

Section Description Provided by Instructor

May serve as a substitute for L6679-Foundation Year Moot Court for first-year students, with prior approval of the faculty Moot Court Director.

The Vis Arbitral Moot is an international competition designed to train students in the use of international commercial law and arbitration for resolution of international business disputes. The competition is structured in two phases: the writing of memoranda for the claimant and the respondent and the hearing of oral argument based upon the memoranda both settled by arbitral experts in the issues considered. The forensic and written exercises require determining questions of contract flowing from a transaction relating to the sale or purchase of goods under the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods ("CISG") and other uniform international commercial law (e.g., the UNIDROIT Principles on rInternational Commercial Contracts) in the context of an arbitration of a dispute under specified arbitration laws and rules. The teams and the arbitrators are from both common and civil law countries, permitting students to learn from approaches taken by lawyers from other systems. Moot court competitions focusing on the CISG and international commercial law and arbitration are currently organized not only by the Vis Arbitral Moot in Vienna (April), but also by the University of Buenos Aires and the University of El Rosario (Colombia) (September) and l'Ecole de Droit at Sience-Po (Paris) (May).