Vis East Moot Foundation

The aim of the Vis East Moot Foundation is to provide educational experiences for students worldwide. The Willem C Vis East International Arbitration Moot (the Vis East Moot) is an international arbitration mooting competition, which is attended by more than 120 teams. The Vis Moot began in Vienna in 1992-1993 and has expanded to approximately 300 competing law schools today. The Vis East Moot began in 2002-2003. The goals of the Vis East Moot and the original Vis Moot in Vienna are the promotion and study of international commercial arbitration and the training of tomorrow's legal leaders in methods of alternate dispute resolution. Because of the international business community’s marked preference for arbitration as the means for resolving trans-border commercial disputes, the Vis Moot was created as a clinical tool for training law students in the crucial aspects of the procedure: research, analysis, drafting and advocacy. Student teams read and analyse the facts and evidence of a case, seek out the relevant legal texts, craft their legal arguments, draft memoranda for the claimant and respondent, and argue orally on the basis of those memoranda before an international tribunal of experts. Each year, the problem involves consideration of the UNCITRAL Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and other commercial law, in the context of arbitration. The rules under which the arbitration is conducted change yearly. The goal of the Vis East Moot is to share with the original Vis Moot in Vienna the promotion and study of international commercial arbitration and to train tomorrow’s legal leaders in methods of alternate dispute resolution. Setting the Vis East in Hong Kong, Asia’s arbitration hub, gives teams from the region the opportunity to participate in a world-class competition without travelling too far from home. And it gives many students from Europe and the Americas a wonderful first