Victory in moot court
Students from Harvard-Westlake and North Hollywood High won top awards in the annual Duke Moot Court competition, held recently at Duke University in North Carolina.
Harvard-Westlake took the No. 1 team award, with seniors Melissa Saphier and Danielle Kolin.
The two happy young men below, Robert Ward and Sam Woolf of North Hollywood High, received the No. 2 team award.
North Hollywood High's Mohini Banerjee and Tara Sulur, pictured and smiling below, placed fourth.
North Hollywood students also took four of the top five speaking awards: Banerjee, Sulur, Sean Oh and Rachel Lee.
The Duke University Moot Court is an annual constitutional law debate tournament for high school students. Last November, pairs of high school students across the United States, Canada and Mexico were invited to submit essays in response to the question: “What was the impact of the case of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld”? Forty-one teams were chosen for the competition.
During the competition, teams argued both sides of the following two issues: Do detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the right to habeas corpus? And, is the 2006 Military Commissions Act constitutional?
-- Mary MacVean
