Dr. Eugenio Vaccari has been invited to take part as a judge in the preliminary rounds of the Ian Fletcher International Mooting Competition 2021, which took place online in the week 15-20 March 2021.
The Ian Fletcher mooting competition (Fletcher Moot) is an international mooting competition in the area of cross-border insolvency law. The competition is organised by two of the leading organisations of insolvency practitioners and academics, i.e. INSOL International and the International Insolvency Institute. This year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the competition took place online, with the oral rounds from 15-20 March 2021.
The Fletcher Moot first took place in 2017. It is open to teams of two to four law students from professionally accredited law schools. No team member may have previously been or currently be a licensed legal practitioner. It is named after Emeritus Prof. Ian Fletcher QC, who sadly passed away on 21 July 2018. Professor Ian Fletcher was an eminent scholar, internationally recognised for his outstanding achievements in the field of insolvency law.
This year, the moot problem was a fictional case taking place in a hypothetical jurisdiction that has adopted the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-border Insolvency and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Enterprise Group Insolvency. The problem considered a range of international insolvency laws and raised a number of contentious issues to challenge students’ critical thinking and research skills. 34 teams from around the world competed in the written round, 12 teams advanced to the oral rounds, all met by 42 judges from 12 countries. The 2021 moot co-ordinator was Professor Adrian Walters (Chicago-Kent College of Law). Dr. Eugenio Vaccari took part in two preliminary rounds of the competition, and in one of them he was the presiding judge of the fictional Supreme Court of Nuzilla.
The Grand Final judges were Lord Justice David Richards (England & Wales), Hon. (ret.) Allan Gropper (USA) and Madame Justice Elsbeth de Vos (The Netherlands) on the semi-finals benches; Justice (ret.) Alistair Norris (England & Wales), Justice Daniel Carnio Costa (Brazil), Madame Justice Nicoleta Mirela Nastasie, PhD (Romania), Hon. Chief Judge Cecilia Morris (USA), Justice Vinodh Coomaraswamy (Singapore) and Mark Phillips QC (UK) on the semi-finals benches.
The Winning Team of the 2021 Fletcher Moot was the National University of Singapore, while the Runner-up was The West Bengal National University of Juridicial Sciences, Kolkata. Congratulations to all participants, as well as to the organisers for the amazing work and the successful outcome of this event!
