Director Jay Shapiro and Jessup Participants Tomer Treger and Jonathan Morgan sat down with Directors Talk for an indepth interview on the film and international law:
DT: What’s the point of a moot court?
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JS: I didn’t know what a moot court was before I took on this film. What I loved about it was the simulation. It’s a fake case, with two fake countries, and a simulation of the ICJ, the International Court of Justice. The fact that it’s fake is really, really important to the entire endeavor because there’s no emotional bias involved. You’re not emotionally invested—you have to pretend you are and get into that mind-set—but you’re not actually emotionally invested, so it can’t cloud your objective approach to the law. When we talk about international law, there’s always a debate over how much of it is really law and how much of it is politics. It might be 99 percent politics and 1 percent law in the real world, but in the moot court, it’s 100 percent law.
DT: So it sort of gives you muscle memory for executing a case without emotional bias.
JM: Whatever the balance between politics and law is in the real world, we’d like to see it shift toward more law, less politics. In the moot, you’re at the ideal balance for that.
To read the full interview, click here.
