Campbell Law moot court team only U.S. team to compete at Belgrade Open

Members of the Campbell Law School’s Willem C. Vis Moot Court team traveled to Serbia to compete in the Belgrade Open Pre-Moot Competition on April 2-3. The competition hosted students from 25 different countries, with registration limited to 64 teams. Campbell Law was the only team from the United States to attend the competition. 

The Belgrade Open Pre-Moot Competition was held at the University of Belgrade and hosted by the Arbitration Association, the Belgrade Moot Center, the German Arbitration Institute (DIS) and the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law. Within the competition, law students from around the world compete in the realm of commercial law and arbitration. The competition was hosted in preparation for the Willem C. Vis moot – the largest private law competition in the world, attended by approximately 400 law schools.  The Willem C. Vis moot is normally held annually in Vienna and in Hong Kong, but in 2022, it is being hosted virtually.  

 The team was accompanied to Serbia by their coach, Campbell Law Professor Raluca Papadima, who teaches Business Organizations, Mergers and Acquisitions and International Business Transactions. 

“I was extremely happy that I could accompany four of Campbell Law’s advocates to Belgrade: Maeve Healy, Caroline Lonon, Jenna Nichols and David Stone,” Papadima explained. “Our team was the only American law school in the competition. As such, we were granted the privilege of arguing in the first round of the competition against the team of the host university, the University of Belgrade, in front of a panel chaired by Professor Ingeborg Schwenzer and a large audience. Our next rounds were against the University of Basel (Switzerland), the University of Lisbon (Portugal), the University of Vienna (Austria) and the University Masaryk (Czech Republic). We learned a lot and made many new friends.” 

The Belgrade Open Pre-Moot Competition was preceded by the Belgrade Arbitration Conference, which was also attended by the members of the Campbell Law team. The conference hosted experts from Switzerland, Serbia, Bulgaria, Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom, who discussed the evolution, procedural intricacies and different perspectives of arbitration, Papadima said.