The Ames Competition is one of the most prestigious competitions for appellate brief writing and advocacy in the country. The students participating in the Semi-Final Round started the competition in fall of this school year, and rose to the final four spots through their strong research abilities and excellent written and oral advocacy.
Semi-Final Round oral arguments will be held in the Ames Courtroom at 7:00pm on March 10th and 11th. Teams competing in the Semi-Final Round are below, as well as the briefs submitted for the Semi-Final Round.
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Spring 2025 Semi-Final Round
March 10th, 7:00pm – United States v. July
Presiding Judges
To be announced.
The Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Memorial Team
Richard H. Fallon, Jr. (1952–2025), was a pillar of the Harvard Law School community for more than four decades. Over those years, he built a legacy as a groundbreaking scholar of constitutional law, a gifted teacher, and a generous colleague.
A graduate of Yale College, the University of Oxford, and Yale Law School, Professor Fallon joined the Harvard faculty in 1982 following clerkships with Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. of the Supreme Court. He became a full professor in 1987 and was twice awarded the Sacks-Freund Teaching Award, in 2001 and 2006.
Professor Fallon wrote extensively on the nature of constitutional rights, the role of courts in a democratic society, and how legal institutions gain and lose legitimacy. His final book, The Changing Constitution: Constitutional Law in the Trump-Era Supreme Court, was posthumously published by Cambridge University Press last August.
Professor Fallon was the chief judge for two of our team members’ 1L Ames oral arguments, during which they got to witness his exceptional kindness and incisive intellect first-hand. As Professor Randall L. Kennedy put it, Professor Fallon “represented the best of Harvard Law School.”
- Eric Krebs (captain)
- Mira Kumar (oralist)
- Leila Malak (oralist)
- Demirkan Coker
- Ceylan Milor
- Brennan Szabo
The Honorable Justice David H. Souter Memorial Team
David H. Souter (1939–2025) served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1990 to 2009. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1966, Justice Souter began a career in public service, acting as Attorney General of New Hampshire, Justice of the New Hampshire Superior Court and the New Hampshire Supreme Court, and Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit—all before his appointment to the Supreme Court.
Beloved for his humility and candor, Justice Souter has been hailed as one of the Court’s great common law judges. His approach to judging was careful and incremental, with attention to lived realities. Indeed, in an age where many criticized the increased partisanship of the Court, Justice Souter repeatedly demonstrated a commitment to principled reasoning, an appreciation for the law’s inherent complexity, and an emphasis on judicial restraint. Above all, Justice Souter held a human-centered understanding of the law. At his confirmation hearing, Justice Souter remarked: “Some human life is going to be changed in some way by what we do . . . And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right.”
After retiring from the Court in 2009, Justice Souter returned to New Hampshire. He participated in civic education reform, heard cases on the First Circuit, and returned no less than six times to Harvard Law School to preside over the Ames Moot Court Competition, in which he had participated in 1966. Judge Kevin Newsom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit remembered of Justice Souter, for whom he clerked: “But if ever there were someone built to live forever—eating his yogurts and cores-and-all apples, running his country roads, and hiking his beloved White Mountains—it was David Souter. The man had a lot of virtue and not much vice.”
- Rachel Yan (captain)
- Kaveh Badrei (oralist)
- Amanda Kaplan (oralist)
- Olivia Hinch
- Hannah Pouler
- Luisina Kemanian Leites
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March 11th, 7:00pm – United States v. Davis
Presiding Judges
To be announced.
The Justice Byron White Memorial Team
Justice Byron White (1917–2002) was an All-American college football player, two-time NFL rushing leader, Rhodes Scholar, decorated naval officer, and associate justice of the Supreme Court. White was born in 1917 on a farm in rural Colorado. He graduated with the highest grades in his high school’s history and attended the University of Colorado. There, he was an All-American halfback for the Colorado Buffaloes, leading the team to an undefeated season his senior year. He was the runner-up for the 1937 Heisman Trophy.
In 1938, White won the Rhodes Scholarship and was a first-round NFL draft pick. Deferring his studies at Oxford, White became the highest-paid player in the league and led the NFL in rushing yards during his rookie year with the Pittsburgh Pirates. After a year of football, White took up his Rhodes Scholarship. Because he was a year behind, he was reputed to work 14 hours a day to catch up. White’s roommate at Oxford remarked that he “studied the rest of us into the ground.” At the outbreak of World War II, White returned to the United States to attend law school in Connecticut. He took a leave of absence to play two seasons of football for the Detroit Lions and again led the league in rushing. Following the 1942 NFL season, White was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy and was awarded two Bronze Stars for his service. After serving his country, he returned to law school, graduated first in his class, clerked for Chief Justice Fred Vinson, and practiced law in Denver. In 1952, he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy—whom White had befriended while a Rhodes Scholar—appointed White as deputy attorney general. A year later, President Kennedy nominated him to the Supreme Court. Justice White served from 1962–1993 and was respected for his nondoctrinaire jurisprudence and practical view of the Court’s role. Despite a lifetime of accomplishments on the field and in the courtroom, White was renowned for his humility. A football teammate recalled that White was “just constitutionally incapable of tooting his own horn.” In the words of his colleague Justice Lewis Powell, White “served in order to serve.” For his legacy of excellence tempered by humility, he remains an inspiration.
- Luke Seminara (captain)
- Katherine Wang (oralist)
- Janson Requist (oralist)
- Pierce Sandlin
- Irene Loewenson
- Will Randolph
The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray Memorial Team
Pauli Murray (1910-1985) was a legal scholar, civil rights activist, and the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. Decades before the term “intersectionality” was coined, Murray labeled the dual layers of discrimination faced by Black women “Jane Crow.” Denied admission to the University of North Carolina because of race and later to Harvard University because of gender, Murray dedicated a lifetime to dismantling the legal frameworks supporting segregation. Murray’s early activism, including a 1940 arrest for refusing to sit in the back of a public bus, underscored a brave commitment to challenging injustice.
Murray’s contributions fundamentally reshaped American law. While a student at Howard University in 1944, Murray wrote a seminar paper arguing that “separate but equal” arrangements were facially unconstitutional—a radical stance that leading civil rights attorneys of the time initially dismissed as too risky for litigation. Ten years later, Murray’s arguments undergirded the legal strategy in Brown v. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall famously referred to Murray’s book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, as the “bible” of the civil rights movement. Decades later, Ruth Bader Ginsburg honored Murray’s work by including her as a co-author on a brief in Reed v. Reed.
Outside of the legal academy, Murray’s life was marked by self-reimagination. In 1977, at age 66, Murray became the first Black woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. And throughout her life, Murray grappled with her own gender non-conformity in an era that lacked the language to describe it. Pauli Murray’s legacy is a testament to the power of the dogged dissenter whose ideas, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, eventually become the bedrock of a more just society. As Murray put it, “In not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each case, I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating vindicated. And what I very often say is that I’ve lived to see my lost causes found.”
- Serena Zhou (captain)
- Kathy Li (oralist)
- Spencer Thieme (oralist)
- Thomas Chang
- David Colón
- Alexander DiMeglio
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