Files
Abstract
Moot courts are simulation exercises where law students argue fictional cases before panels of judges, a pedagogical format that has gained global prominence in legal education. While formally promoted as tools to develop legal research, writing, and advocacy skills, I argue that these competitions function as symbolic arenas where participants enact professional identity and articulate normative visions of law. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted primarily in Russia between 2017 and 2022, I demonstrate that moot courts are crucial spaces where legal professionals and aspiring lawyers sustain the cultural form of law. As state legal institutions in post-Soviet Russia faced deepening legitimacy crises, these competitions emerged as sites where participants could reassert law’s independence and value through performative practice. The dissertation traces how moot courts cultivate an image of law anchored in elite professionalism and interactional expertise, rather than in state power or democratic process. Through role-play that deliberately distances participants from compromised legal realities, competitors perform belonging to an idealized international legal profession by reproducing the adversarial form of courtroom interaction. My analysis shows how this interactional order becomes the foundation for jurisdictional claims—claims not only to institutional authority but to the power to define what law is. Through examination of these performances, I develop the concept of moot jurisdiction to describe how the authority of law can be grounded in enactments of professional expertise in spaces where no binding decisions are made. By treating moot courts as sites of ideological labor and professional formation, this dissertation contributes to anthropological understandings of law as a cultural and semiotic domain. It demonstrates that the authority of law can be produced outside of conventional legal institutions and grounded in embodied forms of transnational professional community.