Clubs & Competitions

This competition gives students the opportunity to present a plea in mitigation on behalf of an historical or fictional character under timed conditions. Previous cases used include Guy Fawkes (conspiracy to cause an explosion), Lady Macbeth (soliciting a murder) and Goldilocks (burglary and criminal damage).

The competition was held on Thursday 07 December 2023, with 12 students taking part. Congratulations to the winner of this year’s competition Vanessa Jessop, who won with her defense of Delilah (Assault occasioning actual bodily harm upon Samson by cutting his hair. Judges 16: 17-20).

This competition is to find the best mooting team from each of the Bar Course providers. Preliminary selection rounds will be held for Lincoln’s Inn students at the BPTC Providers, using a speed-mooting system. The two highest scoring students will go through to represent their Provider in the final rounds, when the teams compete against each other to decide the winning team.

The winners for 2022/23 are Sebastian Dack-Owens and Harry McCourt.

This is an internal debating competition to find the best debating team in the Inn. Team selection will be held at the final Debating Club meeting of the year. Participants must have been selected at this Debating Club Workshop in order to progress to the final. The motion will be announced on the day and the final follow the format of a “British Parliamentary Debate”.

The winners for 2022/23 are Kadira Pethiyagoda and Nimansa Thalduwa.

This is a competition to award the Sir Louis Gluckstein Prize for the best junior advocate at the Inn. It is open to current Bar Course students and those up to one year Call. Competitors are asked to prepare two exercises, a mixture of criminal, civil and family, and will be allocated randomly. The competition will consist of an initial round from which the judges will select up to eight participants to compete in the final.

The competition was held on Saturday 20 April 2024. Congratulations to the winner of this year’s competition Matthew Jahanfar! Well done to all who took part and a special recognition to our runner up and 3rd place competitors, Adnan Khaliq and Victoria Bradshaw.

Students are invited to submit essays for inclusion in the Inn’s annual law journal.  Submissions for the law journal can be on any legal area of interest and, in addition to selection for inclusion in the law journal, there are two named prizes available:

• The Lord Millett Equity Essay Prize is for the submission deemed the best entry on the subject of equity in the law.
  The Law Journal Prize is for the submission deemed the best entry in any other legal area of interest.

The winners will receive a prize of £500, with one runner-up for each prize receiving £100.

The Lord Millett Equity Essay Prize is made possible by a generous legacy left to the Inn by The Rt Hon Lord Millett, who was Treasurer of the Inn in 2004.  In agreement with his family, we have established the essay prize in the field of equity, of which Lord Millett was the outstanding exponent of his time.

Criteria:

• Those submitting an entry must be a current student member of Lincoln’s Inn.
• Submissions can either be legal essays/articles or legal case-notes.
• The maximum word limit is 3000 words.
• Only one essay entry per student.
• Essays must be submitted in Microsoft Word document format.
• All entries must conform to the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA).
• Footnotes are required but bibliographies are not. Footnotes are included in the word count.

All entries will be reviewed by a panel of Benchers and barristers who will select the entries to be included in the journal and those to win the prizes.  After selection, the journal will be published online with hard copies being kept in the Inn’s Library.  Students who have an essay selected will be required to sign a plagiarism declaration before publication.

Essays written as part of a student’s degree may be submitted for selection providing:

• The student declares that the essay has previously been submitted as part of an academic course in their email when they submit it to the Inn.
• The essay is reworked as to make it currently relevant.
• The essay has not been published anywhere.

The deadline for essay submissions has now closed. Those who applied will be contacted in the upcoming months.

The winner for 2022/23 Student Law Journal is Zain Sheikh. You can read the Student Law Journal here.