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.

I hope to see you at this year’s Jenkins Finals.