Please congratulate the winners of the 2025 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition: Aaron Steines and William Welder. Congratulations also go to finalists Suzanne DeGuire and Connor Reed.
Aaron and William received the Franz C. Eschweiler Prize for Best Brief. Aaron received the Ramon A. Klitzke Prize for Best Oral Advocate.
Special thanks to the judges of the final round: the Honorable Paul Thissen, the Honorable Shelley Grogan, and the Honorable Rachel Blise. The time and support of all our judges is greatly appreciated.
The teams in the 2025 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition have distinguished themselves in their excellent advocacy. Many thanks to John Caucutt and Daniel Underwood and the Marquette Moot Court Association for organizing the competition well. We appreciate all the judges who grade briefs and come to the Law School to hear the oral arguments; we could not host this competition without their assistance.
The following teams advanced to the quarterfinal round:
Team 9 – Sydney Kojis and Mikayla Collins
Team 10 – Elizabeth Hansen and Rachel Sweet
Team 19 – Ava Mares and George Certalic
Team 28 – Reese Gee and Anna Pyle
Team 36 – Mario Hernandez and Isabella Gonzalez
Team 40 – Isabella Barnard and Ananda Deacon
Team 41 – William Welder and Aaron Steines
Team 51 – Connor Reed and Suzy DeGuire
The competition was especially fierce at the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds. Two teams—William Welder and Aaron Steines, and Connor Reed and Suzy DeGuire—emerged successfully from those rounds and will compete on Tuesday evening at the Lubar Center.
Bust of Judge James G. Jenkins in Eckstein Hall’s Zilber Forum
The Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition is a spring-semester invitational program for upper-level Marquette law students who have qualified based on their performance in the fall-semester Appellate Writing and Advocacy course. Proceeding in teams of two, students began writing their appellate briefs in January and have now submitted them.
Next up is the Jenkins Competition’s oral arguments. Students argue in multiple preliminary rounds, with the competition going from the original 12 teams to quarterfinal (8 teams), semifinal (4), and final (2) rounds.
We may pause to note that the primary “technical” result may be a single winning team, but along the way all participants will have learned a good deal about appellate advocacy and the law. And that’s the whole point: We denominate it an honors competition partly because of the way one qualifies and partly because there is no academic credit awarded in connection with the competition.
Let’s get back to the oral arguments: The preliminary rounds of this year’s Jenkins Competition are this coming weekend. In addition to joining Professor Love Koenig in wishing the 24 participating students good luck (see her blog post last month noting and naming them), we may peek ahead to next month.
The finals will occur at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 15, in the Law School’s Lubar Center. Anyone in the Law School community (very broadly defined) is welcome to register and attend.
It will be a privilege at this year’s Jenkins Finals for Marquette Law School to welcome—and for the two remaining teams to argue before—three distinguished members of the bench:
Hon. Paul C. Thissen, Justice, Minnesota Supreme Court
Hon. Shelley A. Grogan, L’92, Judge, Wisconsin Court of Appeals
Hon. Rachel M. Blise, L’10, Judge, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin
The competition is named after the Hon. James G. Jenkins. Having retired as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Jenkins served as Marquette University Law School’s first dean (1908–1915). You can read about Judge (or, if you prefer, Dean) Jenkins in a blog post by the late Professor J. Gordon Hylton, which provides a good account of the path of a lawyer in Wisconsin from the mid-1800’s to the turn of the century.
