Goal of the Vis Arbitral Moot. The goal of the Vis Arbitral Moot is to foster the study of international commercial law and arbitration for resolution of international business disputes through its application to a concrete problem of a client and to train law leaders of tomorrow in methods of alternative dispute resolution.

Structure of the Moot. The business community's marked preference for resolving international commercial disputes by arbitration is the reason this method of dispute resolution was selected as the clinical tool to train law students through two crucial phases: the writing of memorandums for claimant and respondent and the hearing of oral argument based upon the memorandums -- both settled by arbitral experts in the issues considered. The forensic and written exercises require determining questions of contract -- flowing from a transaction relating to the sale or purchase of goods under the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and other uniform international commercial law -- in the context of an arbitration of a dispute under specified Arbitration Rules.

In the pairings of teams for each general round of the forensic and written exercises, every effort is made to have civil law schools argue against common law schools -- so each may learn from approaches taken by persons trained in another legal culture. Similarly, the teams of arbitrators judging each round are from both common law and civil law backgrounds. To afford the student lawyers the opportunity to present their cases in an actual arbitration environment, a portion of the oral phase of the Moot is conducted at the International Arbitral Centre of the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber in Vienna.

Sponsors of the Moot The Vis Arbitral Moot is sponsored by the American Arbitration Association, the International Arbitral Centre of the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber, the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the International Chamber of Commerce, the London Court of International Arbitration, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, and the University of Vienna Faculty of Law.