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BREAKING: HLS Postpones Remaining Ames Moot Court Rounds Amid Graduate Student Strike
In a historic move, Harvard Law School postpones the remaining Ames Moot Court rounds as the graduate student strike continues.
Harvard Law School has postponed the remaining qualifying and semifinal rounds of the Ames Moot Court Competition to the spring term, the HLS administration announced in an email to competitors and the Board of Student Advisers (BSA) on Wednesday, citing the ongoing strike by the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW).
The email said that the BSA, “whose members are covered by the HGSU-UAW, plays an integral role in the Ames competition.” In addition to helping teach first-year legal research and writing, the BSA organizes and judges the entire competition up until the final round.
The administration gave no new dates for the remaining qualifying and semifinal rounds and said the school “will share updates on the timing as it becomes available.”
Founded in 1911, the Ames Competition is one of HLS’s oldest and best-known traditions. According to the BSA website, the competition has been “interrupted only by the two World Wars.”
The Upper-Level Ames Competition spans two years. Teams compete in a qualifying round in the fall of 2L and a semifinal round that spring, and the winners advance to a final round in the fall of 3L. The qualifying round has two parts. More than 60 teams of four submitted an initial brief in the opening round, and the top 16 were invited to write a second brief, which was due Friday, Nov. 6, at 1 p.m. Oral arguments were scheduled for next week.
The BSA did not make the decision to postpone the competition, said Ruth Jaensubhakij ’27, the current BSA president, in a statement to the Record. Its members “learned this information at the same time as the rest of the HLS student body,” she wrote.
Still, Jaensubhakij said that postponing the remaining qualifying rounds “respects the collective action of student workers,” while “preserving the integrity of the competition.”
The email from the administration came just a day after the 115th Ames Moot Court Final Round, where the two finalist 3L teams argued before a panel of three federal appellate judges and a public audience in the historic Ames Courtroom.
The Record spoke with members of several teams who had been set to argue next week. They expressed relief at a lighter fall schedule, frustration that the postponement was announced only after the highly publicized final round had taken place, and uncertainty about what comes next. “I guess the strike is working,” said one 2L competitor.
This is a developing story and will be updated.