In which Mootness acknowledges its obsolescence....
You have, I'm sure, heard the chill winds blowing through the dusty streets of the Mootness blog. Noted the tumbleweeds rolling by. Heard the cockroaches scurry over the floorboards of a place where good people once laughed and loved. Seen the spam comments pile up, then cease, because even the spammers can't stand the loneliness. If you were one of the hardy, maybe you even set up camp and just ... waited. Until the silence cloaked you like a death shroud. And even the zombies got bored & hungry and shuffled off in search of fresher brains. So you gave up, tired of seeing Mootness repeat an apparently unanswerable question to Michigan peeps month after month. Tired of seeing the world's deadest live blog post about how some school called Chicago-Kent won some thing called the National Moot Court Competition. (But is the news itself really dead? Really?)
Yeah, well: we had some good times. At the height of its powers, Mootness enjoyed a loyal readership of, like, five people. I wish I could thank all of you personally, but my dinner table only seats four, and some of my plates are chipped.
But the place to go for steaming fresh advocacy results (and spicier commentary than the cautious guy behind Mootness ever offered) is Professor Rob Sherwin's Bench Brief blog. Professor Sherwin's updates come fast and furious from the heart of Texas, or maybe the left shoulder of Texas. His commitment to the sport of mooting and mocking -- and, more importantly, to the training of advocates -- is inspiring. Perhaps most importantly, he has rapidly internalized an eternal truth: it is impossible to report on law school advocacy results without injecting cheesy jokes and funky puns into the mix. That's a compliment. If you can't laugh about moot court, then you can't laugh about ... I dunno, nuns falling down flights of stairs or something. Anyway: read Professor Sherwin's blog. Funnier than nuns falling down stairs. And at least as enlightening.
Another place for results is The Ranker's scoreboard and blog. Whether you love The Ranker and The Rankings of the Ranker or prefer the position of those Rankled by The Ranker's Rankings or wonder whether the frappuccino is worth the froth, he appears to have a good network of sources and posts competition results rather quickly.
I will still be around, teaching my students and doing what I can to help make a community out of those of us that care about the weird and wonderful world of competitive law school advocacy.
