New Mooting Competition Launched: The Jonathan Cooper LGBTQ+ Mooting Competition

The Faculty is delighted to announce the establishment of a brand new mooting competition for 2023, The Jonathan Cooper LGBTQ+ Mooting Competition.

The Competition is the first Mooting Competition at Oxford specifically promoting the intellectual study of legal issues related to sexual orientation and gender identities. It is the brainchild of Richard Wagenlander, a recent Oxford graduate who won the Law Faculty Prize in Human Rights Law this year and is currently an LLM candidate at the University of Cambridge. Richard has worked with the Faculty over the past year to make this event a reality and we are grateful to him for championing this initiative. 

The Moot is named in honour of the late human rights activist and barrister Jonathan Cooper OBE, who passed away in September 2021. He practised at Doughty Street Chambers, particularly in the field of international human rights law, and was an inspiring advocate for LGBTQ+ rights across the world, be it for trans rights, rights of people living with HIV, or victims of conversion therapy. Jonathan Cooper OBE is also the namesake of the recently established Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexualities at Oxford’s Faculty of History, the first Chair of its kind in Oxford and in the United Kingdom. 

The Mooting Competition is open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Oxford and it will fittingly be held during LGBTQ+ History Month on Saturday, 11th of February 2023. The Competition will involve 8 teams of two students each, and consist of quarter-finals, semi-finals and a grand final. The event will culminate in a prize-giving ceremony and drinks reception, and provide an opportunity for students to network with practitioners and academics.  

For its inaugural edition, the competition’s problem question, put together by Professor Jonathan Herring and the Organising Committee, will focus on the constitutional interpretation of the right to marriage, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the right to private and family life in the case of a fictitious country. You can download the problem question and rules of the competition below. 

For general questions or clarifications, please email Richard Wagenlander. Further information on the moot and the exact schedule have been released on the moot website, where you can stay up to date.