Harvard Law School’s FDI Moot Team was awarded the Skadden, Arps Trophy 2013 for winning First Place at the FDI International Arbitration Moot competition, which took place October 24-26, 2013 at the Frankfurt International Arbitration Center in Germany. The six-member team consisted of Rajarshi Banerjee (JD ’14, Oralist), June Hwang (JD ’14, Co-Captain), Sarah Kalin (JD ’14, Co-Captain), Mitchell Moranis (JD ’14, Oralist), Toni Tsvetanova (JD ’15) and Sarah Weiner (JD ’15, Oralist). Rajarshi Banerjee and Mitchell Moranis, as the primary oralists, argued a total of eight and seven times, respectively, in leading the team to victory against Monash University (Australia) in the final round. Harvard faced teams from throughout the world during the competition, such as the National Law University, Jodhpur (India), Russian Academy of Justice (Russia), Judicial Research & Training Institute (Korea), and University of Warsaw (Poland).

The FDI Moot Arbitration competition provides students an opportunity to get hands-on experience dealing with a hypothetical Investor-State arbitration dispute. This year’s problem raised issues relating to investment planning, the tension between the state’s power to introduce new measures to protect public health and its BIT obligation, interaction between intellectual property rights and investment law, and damages recoverable by the investor. This is the second year that Harvard participated in the competition. Last year the team came in Third Place.