The Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria announces with great pleasure and pride that its 2018 Philip C  Jessup International Moot Court Competition team, who ranked fifth in the world at this competition, also won the Richard R Baxter Award for Best Overall Respondent Memorial.  This announcement follows on the Competition announcement that that TuksLaw team also won the Alona E Evans Award for Best Memorial at the White & Case International Rounds.  This announcement was made on 1 August 2018 by Lesley Benn, the Executive Director of the International Law Students Association (ILSA).  In her letter to a very proud coach Gift Kgomosotho, she writes: 

'Dear 2018 University of Pretoria Jessup Team:

I write to congratulate your Team on winning the Richard R. Baxter Award for Best Overall Respondent Memorial in the 2018 Jessup Competition. Following the International Rounds, your Team's memorials were compared against the top memorials from the International Rounds as well as the top memorials from Qualifying Rounds in 65 countries. Your Team's Respondent memorial was determined by panels of prominent judges to be the very best of all Respondent memorials. Your team's winning memorial will be published in the Jessup Compendium, as well as in the ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law.

Please pass this good news along to all of the team members...'

The team, consisting of Thomas White, Mary-Ann Gettliffe, Rohula Bilankulu and Sohela Surajpal also walked away with the Alona E Evans Award for Best Memorial at the White&Case International Rounds.  The UP Law team ranked higher than Harvard University, University of Oxford, Stanford University and Norman Manley Law School, to mention a few.

In response to this news, Professor Christof Heyns, responded as follows: 'This is indeed excellent news. It is an indisputable endorsement of the quality and depth of our team, and of the coach, and in the bigger picture, of our Faculty and what we have to offer.'  He continued by saying that '[P]eople use terms such as ‘world class’ very easily, often to the point where it gets a hollow ring. And as people who live far away from the ‘centre’, from the ivy leagues and the centuries of tradition, we often think we cannot do it. However, this is unassailable evidence of the talent and the ability the law students at the University of Pretoria have to live up to great challenges of our time, and come out on top.' 

The Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition is the largest and most prestigious Moot Court Competition in the world, and the most direct way in which law faculties' students measure their strength against each other.  

The Law Faculty is appealing to its alumni to make contributions to the UP Jessup Fund, no matter how big or small, to enable UP mooters to elevate their achievements on this international platform in 2019 and beyond.