Moot court

I'm going to go with this photo for blip, as it is a memory of a good occasion. It was taken in the same room as yesterday's blip, but from a different angle.

My colleague had organised his students to do a moot court, or a mock trial, on the occasion of the visit of a practitioner who works for the legal service of the European Commission. The students had volunteered to discuss a hypothetical case, to persuade the 'judge' (acting as if he were a judge at the European Court of Justice - hence the picture as the backdrop) and they were excellent. They performed under the pressure of having numerous high powered "visitors" to their classroom sitting around the edge. But as the colleague whose class it was said to them, when reassuring them that they were going to be great - as indeed they were, that he too felt under pressure because both his boss, and his boss's boss (i.e. me) were there seeing how much he'd taught the students in four weeks about the subject on which his boss and his boss's boss are probably amongst the primary experts in the world..... Along with our friend David Edward, visible in three of the photos in this collage, who is the former UK judge at the European Court of Justice, so also has a unique practitioner insight.

As we left the room (a few minutes late), another set of colleagues were patiently waiting to come in, in order to celebrate the launch of a book by yet another colleague. Clearly, these days we are back to the situation where you can have a glass of wine and a canapé more or less any day of the week, courtesy of either the Law School and/or the rest of the University.

Anyway, the moot court was the high point in a difficult day. Unfortunately, news came in this morning that a colleague who was very ill, and in palliative care, had died overnight. That triggered, of course, a flurry of difficult communications, backwards and forwards, and quite a lot of upset staff (and probably students who generally loved this colleague as a teacher).

I am definitely in need of an early night.