Mockity Mock

I think I caught the mock trial bug again this weekend. Friday night, I headed up with some other peeps from UCLA to the Bay Area to compete in an invitational hosted by Stanford Law School. In case you were wondering, there is mock trial for law students, too. It's pretty much the same concept as high school and undergraduate mock trial, but the rules of evidence and trial advocacy play a larger role than the "acting." In other words, there is no "simplified" version of the evidence; we just use the Federal Rules of Evidence ("FRE") themselves.

Anyway, I digress. I drove up on Friday night with my four teammates in two cars. My car had my friend, Anthony, and his dog, Pogi. The other three (Devin, Amy, and Geoff) drove behind us. The drive up was a comedy of errors, except it wasn't all that funny. We left at 2pm from L.A., and we were flying up I-5 until we hit the area before Highway 152. Part of I-5 and Highway 152 were closed because of a "spill" of some sort, so there was a detour set up at that juncture. As a result, though, we sat in stand still traffic for two and a half hours. Bored and tired, we finally reached the detour when I got into my first accident. Imagine a distracted driver in 1mph traffic with an interior light on doing homework and a Poodle dog jumping on the driver's seat just before a crash. That was my car. Heehe. I rear-ended the car in front of me, and no damage was really done, but he still wanted to exchange information. So, I pulled over to the side of the road and took care of that fiasco, which took forever. After that, seeing that the detour was also jammed, we went back south on I-5 and found a bumpy two-lane road in the middle of nowhere and took a fifty mile detour to get to Highway 101. We didn't make it to the Bay Area until almost midnight!

Saturday was the actual day of the competition. I had SO much fun competing! I had forgotten how much I loved presenting a case. And how much fun it is to go toe-to-toe with other teams and hear all the crazy stuff that comes out during trials! The funniest thing I heard was this other team's case theme that referred to a line from Spiderman. Heehee. It was just a really bad analogy. Anyway, we went against two different Boalt teams, and we ended up winning both trials and the whole tournament! It was so exciting, since my team was comprised only of first years (who haven't taken "Evidence" yet). We won an engraved gavel and a bunch of Westlaw points (to trade in for free stuff basically).

And now I'm back in L.A. It was really nice to be home this weekend and enjoy the beautiful weather. It was such a lovely day today; I miss all the trees and "nature" stuff that's around the Bay Area. It was also really nice to see people and catch up on what's been going on. =) It was too bad I had so little time, but I definitely feel rejuvenated for the week ahead...speaking of which, I gotta go finish my paper! Boo. ;-)