模拟法庭

【讲座嘉宾】Abby Zhang

【语音整理】嘟嘟妈

【公众号编辑】风继续吹

  本次讲座为全英文讲座。

【讲座嘉宾及内容介绍】

Abby Zhang - currently the Treasurer of the Mock Trial team at Columbia University.  She has been doing Mock Trial for five years—since freshman year of high school—where she eventually became one of the Mock Trial club heads at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Mock Trial is a competitive public speaking/debate activity in which participants simulate US jury trials and learn fundamental components of trial law and advocacy. It shows a great deal about how our legal system works, how to craft a compelling argument, how to be persuasive as possible.

This talk will share with you about Abby's experience in Mock Trial.

【讲座内容】

Hi everybody, this is Abby Zhang. 

Thank you for coming to my talk about mock trial. 

I've been doing mock trial since my freshman year of high school. I did all throughout high school and then I was the captain of my high school team at Phillips Exeter Academy, and once I got to college at Columbia University, I joined the college mock trial team there as well. 

Today I'm here to share a little bit about what mock trial is, how competitions work, what kind of people might be suited to do the activity as well as my experience, and I'll give you some tips on how to get involved and how to improve your public speaking skills.

I personally started doing mock trial after I attended middle school. I went to an all-girl school in Boston called the Winsor School if you've ever heard of it. 

They had a really competitive mock trial team there, and so when I got to high school, it was immediately one of the activities that caught my attention. 

I'm sure many of you can probably relate to this, but growing up as a Chinese American, I always wish that I was a little bit more articulate. 

I always thought that everyone around me was more eloquent than I was, and I really wanted to improve that. 

After five or six years of doing mock trials, I can confidently say that I've improved drastically in that regard. 

What was once one of my greatest insecurities, it's now probably one of my greatest strengths and I owe that all to mock trial.

To put it simply, mock trial is just a type of public speaking / debate activity where you simulate U.S. jury trials. 

So, it all starts with a case packet that's written by a national or statewide organization, and this case packet basically details a fictional crime allegedly committed by a fictional defendant. 

And so it has all the information you need to know to present a case, so it has the whole storyline, and it has witness statements, and it has exactly what you need to prove to charge the defendant with a crime. 

So, it's like receiving real case materials in real life, and that's what you basically base all of your presentations off of.

So, some examples of cases that I had while in high school. Some are very ordinary. Some are definitely what litigators see in real court in real life. For example, I had an assault case where some kid allegedly pulled the knife out on their bully. I had a few lawsuit cases where a family was suing a teacher for negligence and other family was suing a soccer team for negligence because their child had received a really severe concussion. Some are more far-fetched, so some might be murder cases, arson cases. One of the most probably extreme cases that I ever had was a murder case where the family was involved in the witness protection program, someone had relation to the mafia, so some of them are really fun and really outlandish like that.

Once you get the case packet, you divide into rules. So you can either act as a lawyer, and that's pretty self-explanatory. You pretty much do what real trial attorneys do in real life. You present the case in front of the judge. You deliver statements. You ask questions to the witnesses that get called up onto the stand to testify. And you make objection arguments which if you've ever seen a crime show a courtroom drama kind of like when the lawyer stands up and says objection, but you need to be able to argue it articulately and tell the judge what your grounds for the objection are, and if someone objects you need to be able to respond, etc. That's what lawyers do.

So, we just talked about what lawyers do, now we're going to move on to what witnesses do. Those are the two roles in mock trial. You can either be a lawyer or a witness. Witnesses, if you're a witness, you portray one of the characters in the case. You take on their identity. So, in the case packet that you're given, there are several witness statements, and you basically go through that witness statement and you testify as that character. So, you answer questions that lawyers ask you, and that's pretty much all you do. You just have to bring that character to life, so whereas the role of a lawyer is much more centered around debate, the role of a witness is definitely much more centered around performing and acting and really making the judge believe that you are that character.

Throughout all of high school, I was a lawyer, so that's probably the role that I'll be primarily focusing on today. It is what I know more about. They're actually depended on how your school organizes your team, but sometimes you'll be a lawyer. You'll be both a lawyer and a witness, or you'll just do one or the other. Actually, in college now, I do a little bit of both, but I say for lawyers if you want to take on that role. It's generally more suited for people with an interest in law. It's more based in debate and argument. And whereas if you want to take on the role of witness, it's much more based on performing and acting. Those are the qualities that you really have to have to excel in that role. So those are kind of the differences, and you just have to take based on what suits you the best.

Personally, I think the skills that you gain as a lawyer are more widely applicable than the skills you gain as a witness. As a lawyer, you actually have to become familiar with the rules of evidence, which is what real lawyers use in real trial law in the actual American justice system. So, you have to learn everything. You have to learn all the rules such as what is dismissible in court and what isn’t. You pretty much get really familiar with the ins and outs of how real trials work. I feel really comfortable with all the case law and all the rules of evidence after six years of doing this activity. And you also get to do a lot more thinking on your feet and a lot more debating. In general, lawyers, definitely it takes a little bit more time commitment and a little bit more practice, but you get more out of it in my opinion.

When your team is preparing for a competition, you're going to use the information given to you in the case packet that you receive to prepare both of prosecution case and the defense case. For those of you who might not know those terms, the prosecution is the side that is trying to charge someone with a crime that person being the defendant, and the defense is the side defending that person. So you prepare both sides because when you actually get to the competition before each round, they'll say okay your team is going to be prosecution for this round, and you're going to compete against the other team. And then in the next round, you'll switch, and your team will be presenting the defense against a different team. That's how competitions are set up.

When I was in high school, a lot of our tournaments took place at the actual courthouse in New Hampshire, so we would get there really early in the morning and we would have to go through security through these huge metal detectors and we would actually get to compete in real courtrooms with real jury boxes and real witness stands. And all the judges that came in to preside are either real judges or at least real practicing attorneys. So it feels really legitimate when you're actually at tournaments. It really feels like you're actually a lawyer.

Unlike in real court, the judge doesn't end up finding whether or not the defendant is guilty. That's not how you win a trial. It's not like if your case actually would have won in real life that you win the trial but rather it's based on a point system. So, each statement each with testimony, etc., is given a score out of ten and at the end of the round, the team with the greater amount of points is the team that wins. So actually, rather than it being about the construction of your case which obviously is important, it's actually much more about presentation and teams that have the best presentation do the best.

Earlier, I mentioned that it definitely takes more work and more practice to be a lawyer, and that's because in the actual trial, lawyers definitely get more airtime. How the actual trial works is that both sides will give their opening statements. Those are given by lawyers and then the prosecution will call all of their witnesses to the stand. So, each witness will get asked questions by lawyers from their own team, lawyers from their own side and lawyers from the opposing side. And then they’ll step down and they’ll be done for the rest of the trial. So, each witness gets called, and then after all the prosecution witnesses are done, the defense witnesses will all get called. And then at the end of the trial, lawyers will give closing statements which are also speeches. So that's why lawyers definitely talk more.

One of my favorite aspects about mock trial as a lawyer is the cross examination. That's when you ask questions to a witness on the opposing side, so the witness will just have gone up and told their side of the story, and since their witness from the opposing side it's usually something that's really helpful for the opposite side, but then your job is on cross examination to get up and just slowly pick apart every aspect of what they said on stand, and to make them look either not credible or to poke holes in their story or to even catch them in a blatant lie and it's so fun, it's so fast paced and you really have to be able to think on your feet and take command of the courtroom and really just be in charge. It's honestly one of the best parts of mock trial.

It's probably become clear by now that mock trial is quite different from other types of public speaking, such as debate speech model UN etc. Generally, I think that if you want to choose mock trial over the other types of public speaking, it's really suited for those who are interested in law, then you should definitely take on the role of a lawyer. It's very suited to those who are interested in acting and performing and you should probably focus on being a witness. And overall the activity is definitely more based in presentation and performance than debate model UN per se, so obviously what you have to say is important but rather than training you to write really good content, it trains you to be a really good presenter.

I talked a little bit about statements and witness testimonies, but this is also a key difference between mock trial and some other forms of public speaking, because a lot of what you say in court especially when you're a beginner you write out beforehand and you sort of follow a script almost, especially when you're just starting out. So, statements you generally write that up like a speech you memorize it, you present it. The questions that you're going to ask witnesses if you’re a lawyer, you also write those out beforehand and you practice them. But now after I've been doing it for quite some time, I don't really write scripts for myself anymore. Rather, I just prepared with a list of points that I want to hit and I sort of improvised when I actually get into trial, and I base it off of what actually happens rather than what I've written in preparation.

With that being said, I think that if you're someone who like me when I was first beginning mock trial, if you really enjoy public speaking, you really enjoy performing, but you're maybe not as confident in your eloquence or how well-spoken you are, it's a really good way to really hone that skill so you get to first follow a script and get really confident with being articulate and then slowly little by little, as you continue to practice, you can slowly ease off the script and then you become increasingly articulate, as time goes on, and it's just easier for you to speak freely and improvise.

Finally, the other major difference is that mock trial is very much a team activity. It involves a lot of collaboration, a lot of teamwork, because when you're preparing your case, you really have to be able to digest all the information that they give you and work together to think okay, what are the key points that we want to hit? What story do we want to talk to the jury? And in that sense, the whole team really has to work together. And you win trials not just by being good individually because if you're good and the rest of your team doesn't know you're doing, you're not going to win. So more so than any other type of public speaking activity, mock trial really, really encourages teamwork and collaboration, and eventually as you get more experienced, it calls for really devoted leaders who understand how to properly handle interpersonal conflicts and build collaborative environments.

Now I'm going to talk a little bit about the time commitment for mock trial. I was on a high school team that was pretty competitive I would say. We won multiple state championships. We went to national competitions. So that's a relatively competitive team. For practices, we generally, the full team, practices structure practices, we generally did two times a week, and they were roughly one to two hours each practice, and then on top of that individually, when you're writing your own material or practicing or learning the law, you generally spend an additional one to two hours per week on top of formal practices.

But then when it comes to tournaments or weeks leading up to tournaments, a lot of times you'll practice even more. So, in high school, sometimes the week leading up to tournaments, we practice like four times a week or even almost every night leading up to the tournament. And then the tournaments take up the entire weekend. So basically, the Friday night you're going to go travel and you’re gonna prepare. And Saturday and Sunday, you'll be competing both days. So in that sense, when it is competition season, it's very time consuming, and then on top of that, if you end up being a team captain or a leader in your club, you have to put in even more work for that just to run your club if you're also competing at the same time. So, all of this comes down to a baseline of roughly seven to eight hours a week, and I would say honestly, much more during competition season.

So, mock trial definitely is a really serious time commitment. It takes a lot of time, but I think that's one of the best things about it, because it's an activity that you can really fully dedicate yourself to. And basically, the end result is that everyone who ends up committing to the activity for all four years of high school is really passionate about it. So, you end up finding all of these likeminded individuals who love all the same things as you do. And I found that I've made some of my best friends of my entire life through doing the club, and there's people who really understand me, and we all think the same way and it's because we're all like willing to dedicate ourselves to this, like we're all willing to dedicate so much time to this activity that we all love. So, in that sense, you really built valuable relationships through the activity.

Also, I think that personally I really love mock trial. I've always been really interested in law, so it's something that really fits my interest. So, I've never really minded devoting so much time to it. In high school, on top of mock trial, I danced so I did dancing and I was also involved in a few student leadership committees and then a few identity based clubs, like in Asian affinity group and stuff like that. And then I also ran the humor page of my school newspaper which was relatively low commitment. So mock trial definitely took up the bulk of my time and my other activities were definitely much lower time commitment. And that's how I was able to get everything done, but it's really worth it if you do really love the activity.

I'd like to talk just a little bit more about my personal experience with mock trial in high school, especially at Phillips Exeter Academy. So, for our team, we had tryouts. So, we have tryouts every year on the team, because a lot of people are interested, and we only had room for roughly thirty people. So, we made three competitive teams: A team, B team, and C team. And each had roughly eight to twelve members. It's different from most schools, but I would say that in a lot of places, that's the case because since mock trial really is such a time-intensive activity, there are tryouts there are cuts that people who do end up getting on the team have to know that they have to be committed.

My freshman year, I made the team, luckily. I was on the C team and I definitely had a lot to work on. There were a few other freshmen who had made the B team and that definitely motivated me to want to work hard and study the law really well and be able to improve really quickly. So, I practiced a lot, and then my second year I ended up on the B team, and I actually ended up as one of the team leaders that year. So, I was not only competing on the B team, but I was also helping the team run. And then my third year, I made the A team, and that year that we, the A team, won the state championship, and we qualify for nationals, and that was really exciting to be part of that.

Then my senior year, after three years of competing, I became the club head and so like the overall captain overseeing all three of the teams. So, I basically help develop the curriculum of teaching new kids what mock trial was, how to be good at it. I worked with the club advisors and the people who worked at the statewide organization on organizing tournaments. I helped raise money, help gather resources for the team, etc. All the things that you do as a club head. That became my main focus in senior year was really leadership, how do we make the club as efficient as possible, how do we ensure that people build bonds and collaborate properly and win and do well.

One thing that is really unique about the mock trial team in Exeter is that we actually didn't have coaches. A lot of teams do have coaches. I know my middle school team at Windsor, they had coaches. So, the team really relied on the older students, the club heads teaching the younger students and keeping it running. So, it was not only important to teach the younger students everything they knew about mock trial, but also be able to slowly prepare students to be club heads one day. So like as a senior, we were looking at kids two years younger, three years younger, thinking: oh someday like this kid is really dedicated, maybe someday they will become  club heads and sort of being able to identify people like that and really like invest in them. Yeah, hope that they would someday be able to continue passing down that knowledge of that information.

When I was on the A team in my junior year, we won the state championship for the final round of the state tournament. This is probably one of my most memorable experiences. We were in the courthouse and we actually had a full jury. So, we had twelve people in the jury box, all attorneys, law professors in the New Hampshire area etc., and the judge that actually presided over the round was one of the New Hampshire state supreme court justices. So that was absolutely insane, being able to litigate in front of a judge of that honor and honestly, it was really nerve wracking, but when I look back on it, it's one of my fondest high school memories.

I want to transition into talking about how to become a better public speaker and the tools that we used on the team to help people improve their skills especially as lawyers. So, the first thing that we would do is we would cold call people in practice and we would have them make arguments, do objections etc. And sometimes they would be really caught off guard, and they would stand up and they would say like they wouldn't be so sure of themselves. And we would say: sit down, start over again. And we would just have them do it over and over until they can do it without saying any filler words like ‘like’ or taking awkward pauses, things like that. I really honestly think if you don't feel confident in your speaking skills, practicing over and over again is a huge key to success.

One thing that I still do that I was taught in high school on the mock trial team is to record a video of yourself speaking, and I still do this because when I first entered the team and I still had a lot of improvements to make. Someone once gave me the criticism that my facial expressions were very blank while I spoke. So, in order to fix that, I would take videos of myself speaking, where I would look directly into the mirror and practice speaking. And I would see exactly what my facial expressions look like, and I would just practice fixing them over and over again until I got something that I felt really comfortable and confident. Because honestly a really important part of selling what you're saying is your face. If you look like you believe it, other people will also believe what you have to say.

As a lawyer in mock trial, you're not just standing behind a podium or sitting at a desk. You're actually getting into the well of the court fully standing up and moving around the well of the court, commanding the attention of the whole room. So, it's really important not just to know how to properly reflect your voice, how to speak, but also how to move your body: when to take steps, when to move your arms, how to do it, how to not look awkward while doing it. So, at first, that's really foreign to a lot of people, and you should definitely start out by almost choreographing your movements like dance sort of. So saying like when I see this, I'll move my right arm; when I do this, I'll gesture with my left arm; when I do this, I'll take two steps; when I transition into this next segment or pause, and then I'll stop for dramatically. Movements like that, you really have to train.

One exercise that we would do to really improve movements and presentations with your body, we would find recipes online, such as like one day, we just did a sushi recipe, and you would follow the recipe you would say the words from the recipe out loud while pretending like you were asking questions or giving a statement. So, you would say something like two sheets of nori while a gesture in your head. It's kind of hard to explain over voice but I hope you can sort of get the idea.

Another exercise that we would do is called “slowing down three times”, so you would read a text you give your statement. You read a sentence at one speed, a speed sort of like the speed at which I'm talking right now, which is conversational speed. And then, you would slow down one time, and then you would read the sentence again, this time slower. And then, you would slow down a second time. And then you would repeat the sentence and you would slow down a third time to the point where I felt like you were speaking so ridiculously slow, but then when you went back and gave your statement instead of speaking really rapidly as people tend to do when they put on the spot in public speaking, all of a sudden you would be really calm composed taking pauses and speaking at a really digestible rate.

Those are just a few of the many exercises and drills that you can do to improve your presentation and prove your speaking and your reflection. Those are definitely things that help me and exercises that I did a lot to improve really quickly in high school.

I've gone to the end of what I prepared to say. I guess I'll just leave you with this. Mock trial is really intellectually stimulating activity is really fit for those with an interest in law or passion for performing. And through the activity, you really develop some really good relationships with the people on your team because it calls for a level of teamwork that other public speaking activities really don't. I really love the activity and I would highly encourage you to join your mock trial team at your school or pursue the activity if any of this sound interesting to you. It's really worthwhile, and I hope you'll learn to love it as much as I do.

Thank you so much for listening. I'll now take some questions about mock trial if anyone has any.