Constitutional Law Moot

Article 2A of the Constitution recognises Islam as the state religion. In November 2011 the Moot Court Society of BRAC University set undergraduates the question of whether it could survive a challenge grounded in secularism, the supremacy of the Constitution, the Fundamental Principles and the basic structure doctrine.

Fourteen public and private universities came, from Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet and beyond, each fielding a petitioner and a respondent. I was a law student then, and this report is what I wrote about it for the Law and Our Rights pages.

The competition was the first of its kind in Bangladesh to deal with constitutional law, and the report records that as its point: mooting in the country had been built around other subjects, and here was a bench hearing argument on the constitutional text itself. The rest of what I have published since is downstream of the conviction visible in it, that advocacy training is not decoration on a legal education but a large part of how lawyers learn to reason at all.