Jack Wagner, Editor

PHILADELPHIA – A gavel gives a loud whack! on a raised podium, the judge glaring down at the lawyer who stands before him. The opposing lawyer starts to stand, an objection already forming on his lips while a witness shifts nervously on the stand. But this is no normal courtroom; the witness, the lawyers and even the defendants are all students, and are all acting.This isn’t a real trial, it’s a mock trial. And to some students at La Salle University, it is a passion.

The members of La Salle University’s Mock Trial Association didn’t all plan to get involved, or even necessarily know what Mock Trial was when they first came to the school.

“I remember Pat and I, we were walking around the Involvement Fair,” said the president of Mock Trial, Cole Welsh. “We have a bunch of Father Judge guys from high school. And, you know, Pat and I wanted to argue about something, right? We love to argue politics, whatever it might be. And we saw Mock Trial, you get to argue. So we did it. We signed up, and we love it.”

Each year, the team is given a fictional case where they have to come up with theories and arguments for defending or prosecuting the characters involved. They get assigned roles where they have to play one of the characters in the case, such as a witness, and go to tournaments where they are graded on acting, how well researched their theories are, and how effective their arguments are. The cases are all unique and present new challenges, and the team is already thinking about next year.

“We just finished our last case, which was based off of Murder on the Orient Express. It was some guy who was a billionaire in their little fictional town called Midlands,” said Pat Malloy, vice president of Mock Trial. “His daughter was suing her brother for being responsible for their father’s death. That was a civil case, because nobody was actually going to jail in that case, it was just based off of money, and next year is going to be criminal. We know that because every year it goes civil, criminal, back and forth.”

Though the organization seems very law-focused, several members are not interested in a career as a lawyer. Instead, they see it more as a way to develop the wide variety of skills required to be successful in Mock Trial, such as acting or researching, or even looking at avenues for their current focuses that they hadn’t thought of before.

“I think that it really gives you a lot of expertise,” said Eddie Slegel, vice president of Personnel. “I think it can help in all fields. I’m personally an accountant, and I think that it’s really interesting to learn about some expert testimony, because technically that’s a career field someone like me could enter.”

The team attends and hosts a series of tournaments throughout the year. Last year, they attended invitationals at William and Mary College in Virginia, as well as one at Temple. La Salle also has its own invitational tournament which happens in the fall.

Even with all the excitement from the cases and the tournaments, what really keeps students in the organization is the community that they form while working on the cases together.

“What you find in Mock Trial is that you all work really hard on this case for months and months and months, and then you go and finally put it together,” said tournament director Isabella Teti. “And when everything comes together, I feel like all the hard work is finally paying off. And I would say that it’s one of the best feelings you’ll ever feel, especially when you’re dealing with people you really care about.”

“We’re with each other 20 hours a week, and we spend entire weekends with each other,” said Malloy. “It’s less of just an organization where we come to do simulation trials, and more like a long lost family who comes together for a family reunion every once in a while.”

If you are interested in joining the La Salle University Mock Trial Association or want to learn more about the organization, you can follow them on Instagram @lasalle_mocktrial.