Source: Universities – Science Po in English
Each year, the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition brings together thousands of law students from across the globe, challenging them to tackle the most complex and contested issues in public international law.
For five first-year students at Sciences Po Law School, the 2025 edition was more than just a competition — it was an intense, transformative experience that pushed them to their intellectual and personal limits.
From winning the French national rounds to representing France on the world stage in Washington D.C., this remarkable team not only proved their legal acumen but also exemplified resilience, teamwork, and passion. In this article, they reflect on what it took to get there, the lessons they learned along the way, and the advice they would give to those ready to take on the Jessup challenge.
« The Sciences Po Law School warmly thanks Clifford Chance for its valuable support in the 2025 Jessup Moot Court Competition. This contribution helped our team reach the top 16 worldwide, a remarkable achievement. It reflects both the talent of our students and the value of strong academic-professional partnerships. »
Sébastien Pimont, Dean, and Julie Babin d’Amonville, Executive Director
Can you introduce yourself?
Linn Junge, a first-year student in Economic Law, did Jessup for the second time this year, having won the French championship and advanced to the round of 16 in 2023 with Sciences Po Reims. Hailing from Germany but having also lived in the US, Linn was the team’s captain, and oralist for both Respondent and Applicant.
Gabrijela Papec from Croatia was a world-renowned debater in high school and during the undergraduate degree, skills she leveraged to the best effect in her role as oralist for the Applicant. She is in the English track, alongside Linn and Maria.
Tatiana Van den Haute is a Lebanese first year law student in Droit Économique. After completing her undergraduate degree at Sciences Po, Campus du Havre with an exchange in Taipei, she spent another year working there as a policy analyst. She was able to apply her analytical and public speaking experiences in her role as an oralist for Respondent.
Fanny Burdin-Egloffe is a French student in the first year of the French track in Droit Économique. After a year as a research assistant at the University of Sydney, she brought her analytical and legal research skills to her role as of counsel for this year’s Jessup team.
Maria (Marysia) Szuster is a Polish fist year student in Economic Law with a particular passion for human rights and refugees’ access to education. The skills she gained as a research assistant at Yale University and a writer for the American Bar Association on grave human rights violations she applied in research and finding arguments in Jessup this year.
What motivated you to participate in the 2025 Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition?
For many of us, law and politics are equal passions and two sides of the same coin. International law as a field combines these two disciplines like perhaps no other arena—international law is most closely based on, after all, the political decisions of states. The Jessup Competition perfectly embodies this intersection, standing as the world’s oldest, largest, and most prestigious moot court competition.
What makes Jessup particularly valuable is the opportunity it provides students to spend eight months conducting deep research on widely debated and unresolved topics in international law. Beyond being a rare luxury within our fast-paced curriculum, this extended engagement allows participants to dive autonomously into aspects of public international law that fall outside the ordinary courses, exploring issues we would otherwise never encounter. The challenge of doing that in itself while going through our first year of law school called to all of us. Along with this intellectual challenge, participating in the Jessup opens doors to connecting with a community of like-minded people in all stages of their careers who share a passion for the competition and public international law as a whole.
Can you tell us about your preparation process for the competition?
Our first major task was learning how to balance our considerable coursework with researching public international law and this year’s problem, from scratch. The first phase of research culminated in the memorial writing phase, which was all the more complicated given that our team was spread across the world when the deadline came nearing in January 2025 during our Winter break. Nevertheless, we managed to submit two excellent memorials before returning to Paris, where we earnestly began preparing for the oral rounds.
Knowing how much effort it takes to learn, within a month, to become distinguished oralists and researchers, we met and practiced our pleading between three and five times a week until the national rounds at the end of February.
To our immense joy, we were crowned French national champions of the Jessup on March 1, having gone undefeated throughout all of the rounds. Despite the stress and fatigue that had worn on us over the course of the rounds, we managed to convince a unanimous jury to send us to Washington as the French representative team—a privilege that Sciences Po Law School has not been able to enjoy in seven years.
With that in mind, the preparation period for Washington was, if anything, even more intense than that for the nationals. On the one hand, we knew competition would be even more stiff, seeing that only the best of the best would be in Washington, and on the other, we had to arrange travel, accommodation, and funding in close collaboration with the Sciences Po Law School. All along, however, we continued to reach out to countless professors, friends, and connections whose advice and critiques were absolutely invaluable in continuously augmenting the quality of our performance as a team. The reward was significant. We advanced to the Octofinals in Washington, putting us within the 16 best teams in the world out of the more than 800 that competed this year. Only once in Jessup history has France advanced further than this.
Gabrijela Papec, Linn Junge received awards during the national rounds. Could you tell us more about that experience and what it meant to your team?
Jessup is 100% a team effort, but watching two of our team members get the recognition they deserve for all their hard work and talent was incredibly satisfying. The fact that both of the top speaker awards at the national rounds went to our team demonstrated what a resounding victory our team collectively enjoyed. So while Gabrijela and Linn are undoubtedly deserving of this award individually, we all felt it was more of a collective accolade.
Gabrijela also got 17th best oralist in the world at the international rounds, which is an incredible achievement in itself and felt like a validation both of her exceptional performance and all of our efforts.
Do you have any advice for future students who might want to participate in the next edition of the Jessup Moot?
When starting out, read and re-read the problem at length – then make sure you understand how international law works. Read commentaries on treaties and cases, know the histories of the institutions, conventions and treaties that you’re dealing with and why they are relevant. The issues that the Jessup will throw at you are qualified as ‘hard problems’ in international law, meaning that they are by nature unresolved and can be argued both ways. Stand on the shoulders of those who studied those problems in depth before you, in order to gain as holistic an understanding as possible of what they represent and the implications your arguments have.
Be passionate about it. This competition will take a big part of your life for 8 months, so might as well be obsessed with it. On this note, the team dynamic is everything. It starts on a personal level: because of the intensity, it is imperative that you get along with your team members. Knowing each other well will be invaluable in understanding how to best support one another over the course of the journey—from initial research to competing. From there, you need to stay accountable to one another, because everyone has to do their job, especially in the written drafting phase. And lastly: open communication is key. Again, the timeframe of the competition is too large to let slight frustrations and issues between team members fester until they become proper problems. If you accept the intensity and commitment, it will be a ride that you will be forever grateful for!
