Students place in top 10 of highly competitive national legal brief writing tournament

Two Clemson University students earned a top 10 placement in a highly competitive national legal brief writing tournament.

Senior philosophy major Teresa Ribeiro and recent political science graduate Caroline Morgan, who minored in history, placed sixth among those writing for the respondent out of 214 participants in an American Moot Court Association competition. The association announced the results of the winter contest in March.

The two finished ahead of students attending Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, among others. Ribeiro and Morgan submitted an appellate brief addressing questions in U.S. constitutional law involving substantive due process and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Both have career aspirations to practice law.

Philosophy lecturer Cary Berkeley Kaye, who teaches moot court, coached the pair.

"Teresa and Caroline are terrific writers who made sense of complex constitutional-law doctrines," Kaye said. "I'm proud of their accomplishment and their hard work over their years in moot court."

Moot court is one of multiple pre-law classes the College of Arts and Humanities offers. This program is one of Dean Nicholas Vazsonyi's four pillars of focus for the College that was founded in July 2023.

"Congratulations to our students and to Cary for her excellent coaching and support of our pre-law programs," he said. "Pre-law has become one of the four pillars of our new college, and I sense this is only the beginning."