Speaker Series: Grigory Gorbun

Moot courts—competitive legal simulations where law students argue fictitious cases before panels of judges—have experienced remarkable global growth in recent decades. They have become arenas of international prestige, with law firms investing heavily in organizing and sponsoring competitions, legal educators promoting them as powerful tools for reshaping professional culture, and international institutions using them to advance their jurisdictional claims. My book project asks: why have these seemingly trivial role-play exercises become so central to global legal education, and what does this tell us about how the authority of law itself is being reimagined in the world today?

This talk focuses on the book’s central theoretical contribution. I argue that moot courts shift the grounds of law’s authority away from state sovereignty and toward a transnational legal professional community. Drawing on ethnographic research at Russian moot court competitions, I demonstrate how, in a context where state legal institutions face crises of legitimacy, legal professionals use these competitions to sustain their commitment to law as worth preserving and performing correctly. Moot courts become sites where international interactional professionalism defines what “good” law looks like, in explicit contrast to failing state institutions. I call this dynamic “moot jurisdiction,” a process of authorizing law in institutions that have no legal authority or political power.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

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Grigory Gorbun (he/him) is a legal and linguistic anthropologist studying how the authority of law is produced and contested beyond conventional legal and political institutions. His research relies on ethnography, interviews, and interactional analysis to reveal how attitudes toward law are transferred, upheld, and anchored in socially recognizable patterns of communication. Gorbun completed his MA in Anthropology of Law from Université Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.