Moot court is a competitive oral advocacy program in which, as a student, you and a partner or two partners, take on a legal brief, and then you write it from the beginning to the end on a specific problem. And then after you're done writing the brief, you then go to a competition, and you argue it in front of a panel of up to three judges, with a variety of other teams. Some competitions have 15 teams. Some competitions have up to 40 teams. And most of the time you go and you travel the country, and you compete at that location for the top prize of the championship.
By being a member of the Law Journal, students are going to be able to really enhance their legal reading and writing. It's a process where you're going to be writing a note, which takes over 100 hours to do over the semester. And so you're going to have to put in a lot of time and effort. But by the end of that, your research and your writing skills are going to be very top tier.
A mock trial is essentially where you hold a real trial, a jury trial, sometimes we'll have a jury, sometimes we don't, it just kind of depends on the competition. Regardless, it's a way to get real world experience in the courtroom, in the trial setting. And that appeals to me, because I want to be a litigator. I want to prosecute. So being on the mock trial team is going to give me that experience that I need to succeed in the future.
So the academic honors program is something that we started a few years ago. Our goal was really to attract the best and brightest to SIU law and to retain our exceptional students who've done really well.
What it is, is an opportunity for those students to gain some additional networking experiences that they wouldn't if they were just a member of the law school. We provide them some individual mentoring as the directors of the program. And then one of the highlights of the program is that they complete a capstone project at the end of their third year. And so what this is, is it gives them an opportunity to decide what could they do to enhance their portfolio as they're thinking about entering into the workforce.
