Students Beatriz Brito and João Francisco Diogo from the New University of Lisbon Faculty of Law are the winners of the National Moot Court's second edition and Manuel Rocha, student from the Catholic University of Lisbon's Faculty of Law was awarded the prize for best speaker. The winners were awarded a summer traineeship time at VdA and the best speaker was awarded an iPhone by the head of Vodafone's legal department, Paulo Marcelo.
The Moot Court competition took place on the 7th December at the Lisbon's Court of Appeal whose president, Luis Vaz das Neves, delivered the opening speech, underlining his ‘great joy to be able to support this kind of initiative by Law students'.
The National Moot Court also counted with the support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros - MNE) and from Vodafone and was organized by the Students Association of the New University of Lisbon Faculty of Law (Associação de Estudantes da Faculdade de Direito da Universidade Nova de Lisboa - AEFDUNL) and the Portuguese Society of International Law (Sociedade Portuguesa de Direito Internacional - SPDI).
"We had the political, academic, legal and business worlds represented at this awards ceremony and, hopefully, among these entrepreneurial students are the future politicians, professors, lawyers and businessmen" commented Rodrigo Esteves de Oliveira, VdAcademia's president and also partner at VdA.
The competition counted with thirty two students coming from the Faculties of Law of the Catholic University of Lisbon, the University of Coimbra, the University of Lisbon, the New University of Lisbon and the College of Political and Social Sciences.
The jury was composed, among others, by Manuel de Almeida Ribeiro, SPDI's President, Miguel Serpa Soares, Head of the Legal Department at the MNE, Armando Marques Guedes, Associate Professor at the FDUNL, and also from VdA's part, Miguel Mendes Pereira, Sofia Barata e Ana Lickfold Novaes e Silva.