The Annual John Marshall Law School International Moot Court Competition in Information Technology and Privacy Law is one of the most highly regarded mock appellate court competitions in the world.
Each year, teams from law schools throughout the United States and as far away as Canada, Australia, India, South Korea, and Cameroon come to The John Marshall Law School to brief and argue emerging issues in information technology and privacy law before distinguished federal and state court judges, professors, and experienced practitioners.
Competitors gain valuable litigation experience through a rigorous writing exercise as well as an intensive sequence of oral arguments. The top briefs in each year's competition, along with the competition bench memorandum, are published in the John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law (available in print and online). As a result, students have an opportunity for publication, while contributing to the body of knowledge in the rapidly-changing fields of information technology and privacy law.
John Marshall students gain a unique hands-on opportunity to analyze and research substantive technology and legal issues through the drafting of the competition problems and bench memoranda. Students also help with competition operations.
Judges, practitioners, educators and other participants gain insight into developing issues, have the chance to mentor the next generation of lawyers, and build valuable networking opportunities.
Frequently, participants in the competition address novel legal problems months or years before similar issues reach the courts. In 1996, for example, competitors considered the implications of a domain name registration authority revoking a domain name because the registrant had been accused of sending spam e-mails. In 2006, an issue of first impression for the courts arose when an Illinois firm asked a court to order the registration authority to suspend a British company's domain name, alleging that the company had falsely accused the Illinois firm of sending spam. In this year's competition, advocates are addressing the liability of a person who posted a defamatory page under a classmate's name on a social networking website. A similar lawsuit was filed a few weeks ago in Texas by a school administrator against two students who posted a defamatory MySpace page under her name -- apparently the first widely-reported case of this nature.
The information technology and privacy landscape has undergone astounding changes in 25 years. In 1982, the year of the first competition, only four percent of American homes had a VCR. It was not until a year later that the term “Internet” was first used. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act would not be passed for another four years and it would be eleven more years before the first graphical web browser Mosaic was released. It would be another 16 years before the number of websites on the Internet reached one million.
There is now widespread acceptance and use of technologies that did not exist 25 years ago. The proliferation of crimes such as identity theft, acts of terrorism, governmental surveillance, the growing use of data mining and personal profiling, and a myriad of other factors have raised public awareness of the impact of emerging technology on individual privacy rights and society in general. This competition has been on the forefront of presenting these issues to the legal community and asking participants to consider questions such as:
• Should a bank be liable for release of computerized customer information?
• Is there a cause of action for computer programmer malpractice?
• Are privacy rights implicated when information compiled from public records is republished?
• Is a contract made via the internet enforceable?
• Does monitoring and recording of voice mail messages in the workplace constitute a violation of privacy law?
• Does the spouse of a political candidate have any right of privacy regarding health information?
We will continue to ask the novel and perhaps unanswerable questions as the Annual John Marshall International Moot Court Competition moves into its second quarter century.
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