Notes

-In 2005, I won the High School Mock Trial National Championships, a victory that was both huge and, to most people, meaningless. Ten years later, I returned to nationals to try to make sense of what that victory meant — and what this competitive celebration of our legal system even is.
-could do with Lynbrook Mock Trial or Model UN.
-“If you see a real trial and you see the kids have a trial, you’ll be surprised at the quality of advocacy,” he shouts, and recites a couple of lines of the North Carolinian state constitution off the cuff. “This is what the rule of law is about, treating everybody the same,” he says. He continues: “So many of these kids are going to be doctors or accountants or engineers. This will be their exposure to the law before they become jurors.
-Ten years ago, when I was a high school senior, after my team won California’s state mock trial competition — which was itself huge — we went to nationals, held that year in Charlotte, North Carolina, and we won that too, making me team captain and lead attorney of the best mock trial team in America and, arguably, the world. It was, certainly at the time and for a long time after, the most significant achievement of my life. Three months later, though, I got to college, where everyone, it seemed, had been truly great at something that was now essentially meaningless. I found myself embarrassed whenever I would think about the win. Sometimes I couldn’t help but talk about it. A guy once listened to me talk about it and said, “That was a really long story.” At some point, I stopped talking about it. At some point I started thinking about what this activity was and wondered, why had I cared so much about competitive fake law?
-Do you want to be a lawyer/work in UN stuff?
-“I don’t think so.” Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love mock trial, he goes on. He’s done mock trial for all four years. And his team has worked so hard, for so long. It is a feeling I know well.