Pictured: Colleen Nickel and Jake Berger

Jake Berger and Colleen Nickel, third-year students at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, will represent the law school in the Andrews Kurth Moot Court National Championship. The tournament will take place January 22-25, 2014 at the University of Houston Law Center’s Blakely Advocacy Institute.

The Moot Court National Championship is an annual “best of the best” competition that recognizes a law school’s sustained excellence in the art of written and oral advocacy. Each academic year, the organizers track the results of moot court competitions involving American law students. Only the sixteen top-scoring schools in the country are invited to compete. This is the sixth consecutive year that IIT Chicago-Kent has been invited to participate in the prestigious competition.

The students will argue a federal appellate case, Friends of Newtonian v. United States Department of Defense and Mainstay Resources, Inc. Team member Jake Berger majored in political science and international studies at the University of Wisconsin. Teammate Colleen Nickel graduated from Michigan State University with a double major in political science and history.

The National Moot Court Championship is sponsored by Andrews Kurth LLP; the University of Houston Law Center’s Blakely Advocacy Institute; the Environment, Energy & Natural Resources Center; Edison McDowell & Hetherington; the Natural Resources Defense Council; and the University of Houston Law Alumni Association.

IIT Chicago-Kent is the only law school ever to win the National Trial Competition and the National Moot Court Competition in the same year (2008), and the first school in more than 30 years to win the National Moot Court Competition in two consecutive years (2008 and 2009).