Questions From the Bench are a Gift; or, Why You Should Absolutely Apply to Competitive Moots
By Curtis LeBlanc
This post can also be read at the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities website: cnlh.ubc.ca
The week that the competition dates for the 2025 Gale Cup were officially confirmed by the Criminal Lawyers Association, my wife and I found out we were expecting our first child. For the next four months, my life would alternate between section 8 jurisprudence and preparing our family for our new life. One morning, I would be poring over search and seizure case law—then at night, I would assemble a crib or a tiny closet or a changing table. The next day, I’d be picking my cuticles in the waiting room of the ultrasound clinic while my wife was being examined for the first, the second, the third time. The next night, it was another trip downtown to the Crown appeals office for a practice in front of some of the most accomplished criminal law practitioners in the country.
To say that the second year of my JD has been interesting would be an understatement. I came to law school in my early thirties for a new challenge and broader career prospects, and I’ve never been so excited, stressed, relieved, focused, anxious, elated as I was in the past six months. The news of our daughter will make this period of my life impossible to forget. But that means I’ll always remember to bore her with the story of how, while she was growing big and strong, I won the Gale Cup with three of the smartest and most dedicated people I’ll ever get to know.
I knew I wanted to moot even before I was accepted to law school. I came to Allard with an active career in Canadian literature, publishing a novel in 2023 and a couple of poetry collections before it. I’ve never turned down an invitation to do a reading or appear on a panel, as public speaking has always made me feel somehow more alive. It’s not that I don’t find it nerve-racking. I’ve always had nerves, but it’s like my wife tells me: you’re nervous because you care.
What’s always been exciting to me is the extent to which our own thoughts can surprise and transcend in the context of live dialogue. This notion found new life in a bit of wisdom we received often while practicing for the Gale: questions from the bench are a gift. Over the course of the nearly a dozen full practices we did leading up to the competition, almost all the crucial revelations I had about our position on the issue came as the result of probing from our generous, brilliant guest judges.
Which reminds me—you might be wondering, what was the issue? This year, the Gale Cup took up the Supreme Court of Canada’s 5-4 decision in R v Bykovets, 2024 SCC 6 as its sujet du jour. The facts of this case are not particularly interesting, so I won’t expound on them here. But the ultimate holding was: Canadians have an expectation of privacy, for the purposes of section 8 of the Charter, in their IP addresses. It was a win for digital privacy advocates and a potential wrench in the gears for law enforcement investigating online crime. What’s more, the decision was based almost entirely on only ten general points from an expert at the trial level, which were never challenged by the Crown.
This made our task as mooters even more intriguing. On one hand, the outcome felt principled in the sense that I personally believe individuals deserve a very high degree of protection from state intrusion when it comes to privacy in their digital lives. Protecting an IP address was maybe the most obvious way of accomplishing this. On the other hand, the reasoning the court engaged in to arrive at their conclusion felt at times like it lacked important nuance and a solid footing in the totality of the circumstances of the case. Is an IP address really the ‘key’ to the most intimate details of our online lives? This made it the perfect problem for the competition. There was plenty for both sides to sink their teeth into.
For four months, under the guidance of our outstanding coaches, Professors Isabel Grant and Dr. Janine Benedet, KC, my teammates and I worked our hardest to approach something nearing expertise on the topic of digital search and seizure. It was the deepest dive I had taken into any single legal topic to date. Our group chats were esoteric at best, obnoxiously niche at worst. We committed to memory the Supreme Court’s rulings on section 8 from Hunter v. Southam Inc, [1984] 2 S.C.R. 145 onward, with an eye especially to the digital realm. We started with the academia relied on by the interveners at the SCC level, and then tumbled down the rabbit hole that is privacy law scholarship. We monitored lower courts for their application of the Bykovets decision until the day our facta were due. Special props are owed here to two of my teammates, Siobhan Toal and Tyleigh Massey-Leclerc, whose diligence and meticulousness raised all four of us up to another level of preparedness and proficiency. And that’s on top of their outstanding oral advocacy!
I can’t speak as a professional—obviously—as I’m still only a student, but I have to imagine that participating in a competitive moot is one of the best things you can do to prepare for a career in litigation. Where else would you get anything close to this level of experience in such a condensed period of time? From the first week of January, we practiced once—sometimes twice—a week in front of razor-sharp litigators who volunteered their time to help make us into better oral advocates ourselves.
They were tough—at times so much so that I earned a bit of a reputation for breaking with the formalities of the moot court to engage in earnest with the bench. On these occasions, I would wander out of an exchange between counsel and jurist, and into a conversation between two people trying to solve a mutual problem. I had to learn that the colloquialisms and contractions of the everyday (yup, absolutely, does that make sense?) fell well short of the lofty register of the moot court.
“We’re working on it,” our coach would say after the second or third judge in a row would tell me during the feedback portion of our practices that I was right on the cusp of being too informal. But some of that informality arose from the fact that these guest judges did not treat us as ‘only’ students, but rather as capable legal minds. The depth of their questions and the rigour of the overall exchange with the bench reflected that. I wanted to tell them: let’s get to the bottom of this. Let’s strip away the pretense and just talk about this case.
This tension has become a throughline in my legal education. As a poet and novelist, I actively pushed back on the notion that poetry and literary fiction are obtuse and impenetrable through my own conversational writing style. It’s because of my literary work that I feel so at home with the abstract ideas and untidy resolutions of law. I also recognize the value in presenting them in a way that a reader can still effortlessly connect with. Every law student’s least favourite answer from a professor to their pressing legal questions—it depends—usually feels appropriate to me, if nevertheless unhelpful. It’s also a concise representation of the complex and deeply human problems that the law seeks to address. In the end, it all really does depend.
But while legal writing purports to be simple in its mechanics and presentation, the language of law could not be more inaccessible. So which is the proper approach? In earlier edits of our factum, we received consistent feedback to do away with all the latin phrases and legalese that permeated the decisions and texts that we studied in class.
The obvious problem, to me, is this: If the legal profession itself has to actively resist the official diction of its subject, then what hope do those without legal training have? The vast majority of people to whom our laws apply are never given the Rosetta Stone that is a legal education, the key to law’s understanding. This is not only a crisis of access at the most fundamental level, but a systemic barrier to both legal and social equality.
This conversation is one for a different time, and a much longer piece, but it will likely preoccupy me for all the years I practice law. For now, I’m going to leave you with a few scenes from the competition in Toronto.
For one weekend in the dregs of winter, mooters representing nineteen different law schools from across Canada converged on the Downtown Double Tree by Hilton alongside justices from this country’s various levels of court. There were nearly as many justices in attendance as there were mooters. You couldn’t ride the elevator without wondering if the smartly dressed individual getting off on the floor below you would be seated at the bench in front of you when your time to moot came. I even wolfed down an entire continental breakfast beside Supreme Court Justice Moreau without ever realizing she was seated next to me.
The preliminary round was held in the new Ontario Court of Justice building blocks from Nathan Phillips Square. It was a building of clean lines and right angles, with modern Lego-like accent walls in all the hallways. On the first evening of competition, our Respondents faced off against the Appellants from York University. Our pair was poised and exceptional—matched by the mooters from York, one of whom won the award for top oralist in the finals. Dylan Nouri, one of our teammates, deserves high recognition for this portion of the competition. A trained actor with a BFA in theatre, he has the elocutionary chops to back up his undeniable intellect, and this was on full display at the Gale Cup.
The following morning, Tyleigh and myself fought off jetlag and more than held our own against the Respondents from the University of Alberta, who were themselves excellent. A half-hour later, we were back at the Double Tree for a banquet lunch to announce the finalists. When we found out our team was headed to the finals and our Respondents would be arguing against Laval, we didn’t even get the chance to stop by our hotel rooms before we were ushered out into the Ontario cold once more, down the street to the original Osgoode Hall, home to the Ontario Court of Appeal since 1846.
We were sequestered in a smaller court room with walls and wooden benches all lacquered in the same oppressive orange stain. We weren’t allowed to access our phones, so I reluctantly said goodbye to my wife, who remarked that the whole Gale Cup thing felt like some kind of secret society. The trip was the longest I had been away from her during her pregnancy—and will likely be for years to come. Inside the room of almost phosphorescent orange, Tyleigh and I coached Dylan and Siobhan on the nuances of our arguments, as they would need to switch sides for the Finals and argue the Appellant perspective.
I’ve already told you the outcome. Siobhan and Dylan took to the podium in the antique opulence of Osgoode Hall—arguing in front of Justice Moreau of the Supreme Court of Canada—and did not miss a beat. They were pretty well perfect. That night, at a cocktail reception hosted across the street at the University Club, we were announced as the winners of the 2025 Gale Cup Moot Competition.
2025 Gale Cup Moot Competition winners, Allard law students Curtis LeBlanc, Dylan Nouri, Siobhan Toal, and Tyleigh Massey-Leclerc
If you are at all interested in adding a competitive moot to your law school experience, I’m here to tell you: don’t hesitate. Apply. It is worth every minute of the grind. If you’re lucky, and get paired with truly exceptional teammates and coaches like I was, you might come out of it with a great story to tell your kids. I’ll be telling mine very soon.
For more information on Gale Cup Moot: https://www.galecupmoot.com/