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rounds in which the teams might argue in favor of the position taken in their brief or against it. Based on oral arguments that would take place in front of three judges, as is done in the federal courts of appeal, eight winning teams would proceed to round two, four to round three, and two to the final round. The best brief, whether or not written by a team that made it to the finals, would receive an award, and a prize would be given to the best speaker at the finals.
There was more. Distinguished attorneys and actual state court judges would judge the first two rounds. The final round would be judged by distinguished members of the federal bench and would be attended by a high percentage of the student body and many faculty members. For whatever reason, I decided to participate. I was paired with a smart and affable student named Simon Selber, and the question to be argued related to the First Amendment rights of prisoners. Our brief was pro-prisoner, but we argued each side in winning the first three rounds. Thus, we made it to the finals, which were held on Mon- day April 8, 1968, only four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
The finals were held in front of a packed house in an auditorium at the law school. Simon and I had to argue the pro-government side of the issue, and the judges, who were acting as if they were the United States Supreme Court, played their roles to the hilt. That was not difficult for them. They were Leonard Moore, then a sitting judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Harold Leventhal, then a sitting judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Cir- cuit, and, finally, Abe Fortas, who did not have to act at all, as he was then a sitting Justice on the United States Supreme Court. (When Earl War- ren retired, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Fortas to replace him as chief justice. Republicans and conservative Democrats threatened to stage a filibuster, and Fortas’s supporters were unable to muster the votes needed for cloture. He thus withdrew from consideration. Some con- tend that the Robert Bork hearings were a direct political result of this fight. Fortas, who was thought of as Johnson’s lawyer, was best known to law students for his pro bono representation in the landmark case that
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