Out of a total of 200 teams that participated in this year’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) Public Interest Law Moot, the UJ Team won the best written submissions/heads of argument that took place on the 29th of April 2022! The team is composed of Mr Odwa Dokomfana and Ms Londiwe Mazibuko, both final year LLB students. This year’s CALS/SLS Public Interest Law Moot focused on “an application for direct access to the Constitutional Court, to challenge a mandatory vaccination policy in the workplace”. Coached by Mr Louis Koen (Assistant Lecturer), Mrs Kgomotso Mufamadi (Lecturer), Ms Meghan Finn (Lecturer) and former Law Mentor Mrs Brooke Badenhorst.

The Public Interest Law Moot Court Competition, hosted by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (at Wits) in collaboration with the Student Litigation Society, gives law students the opportunity to showcase their skills by working on a hypothetical case which brings together questions around labour rights, the rights of children, the right to education, the interests of the public as well as individual rights to bodily integrity, amongst other rights, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teams compete against one another to progress from initial rounds of written submissions to a virtual oral submission round, where teams present their oral arguments on a virtual platform. The final round of the Competition saw the successful teams making oral submissions before a panel of judges at the Constitutional Court of South Africa in April 2021. Members of the winning team have the opportunity to be preferentially considered for a fully paid internship at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies.

Follow #PILMOOT on Facebook and Twitter to follow the developments of the competition.

Find out more about the Student Litigation Society.