The Commissioner for Education participates in the finals of the 8th Edition of the International Moot Court Competition in Law and Religion 2025

The Commissioner for Education participates in the finals of the 8th Edition of the International Moot Court Competition in Law and Religion 2025

Published March 19, 2025

The Commissioner for Education, Chief Justice Emeritus Vincent A. De Gaetano, participated in the finals of the 8th Edition of the International Moot Court Competition in Law and Religion 2025 which was held in Rome on the 13th and 14th of March at the Rome Campus of the Catholic University of Notre Dame du Lac of Indiana (USA).

The event, organised by a group of Italian academics members of the Associazione di Diritto Pubblico Comparato ed Europeo, brings together law students from Europe and the United States who argue a fictitious case before a panel of judges under conditions as similar as possible to those in a real live courtroom. This year’s event was sponsored mainly by the University of Notre Dame du Lac and by Bringham Young University.

This year’s finals saw teams of students from Benjamin Cardozo School of Law (New York), the Bocconi University (Milan), Emory University School of Law (Atlanta), Mathias Corvinus Collegium (Budapest), Milan State University, the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv), Complutense University (Madrid), Bringham Young University (Utah), Notre Dame du Lac School of Law (Indiana), St John’s University School of Law (New York) and Pepperdine Caruso School of Law (California) argue the case before two panels of judges – a panel of American judges, as if the case was being argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on the basis of the Constitution of the United States, and a panel of judges from the European Court of Human Rights, as if the case were being argued before the ECtHR on the basis of the provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights.

The Commissioner for Education, himself a retired judge of the ECtHR, sat on the second of the abovementioned panels (see picture) alongside Prof András Sajó, also a retired ECtHR judge and currently professor of law at the Central European University, and Prof Giada Ragone, associate professor of Italian and Supranational Public Law at Milan State University.