By: Monica Carinci, JD, Windsor Law
Windsor Law has been selected to participate in the oral rounds of the 15th Annual Oxford International Intellectual Property Law Moot Competition! 24 teams over a total of 59 written submissions were invited to participate this year. The student team members, Ruebe James (2L), Sanjeevan Shivakumar (3L), and Shannon Uhera (3L), and their coach, Professor Pascale Chapdelaine, will travel to the University of Oxford next month to participate in the world-renowned competition.
Over the weekend of March 16th to March 18th the team will present arguments in four preliminary rounds before the Supreme Court of Erewhon, a fictional jurisdiction. This year’s moot problem requires the team to address three issues including: an alleged infringement of the claimant Whispering Gums Winery’s patent for a bottle that improves the fizziness of sparkling wines. Also, whether the use of the word “Erewine” by the defendant Loddon River Vineyards to describe a wine produced in the fictional “Erewhon” region constitutes passing off. To confront these challenging issues, the spirited team has been practicing with various expert practitioners in IP law, as well as members of Windsor Law’s faculty. More about this year’s problem can be found here.
Submissions were made from twenty-one countries around the world and a record number of 59 submissions were received. Entrants included teams from Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Switzerland. Twenty-four teams total were selected to participate in the oral rounds of the competition, and Windsor Law is one of four Canadian law schools invited. “We are excited to moot against teams from around the world to see how students from different legal systems and educational backgrounds will attempt to tackle the same problem” says Shannon Uhera on behalf of the Windsor Law team. A complete list of finalists can be found here.
Last year, Windsor Law’s team made the quarter finals of the 2016 Oxford International Intellectual Property Law Moot and were ranked within the top eight teams in the world. You can learn more about last year’s competition here.
We congratulate this year’s team on their achievement thus far and wish them the best in oral rounds next month!