Third-years Brian Wong and Bianca Forde practice before William “Mo” Cowan. Photograph: Frank Curran

On a March afternoon, in a 43rd-floor office with a bank of windows overlooking Boston’s financial district, Bianca Forde, a third-year Boston College Law student in a gray tweed dress, stood at the head of a cherry-wood conference table and faced a man in a business suit sitting in a leather chair.

“Your Honor, may I begin?” she asked.

The man nodded solemnly, taking a swig of water from a plastic bottle before twice striking it against the table, as though it were a gavel. A few minutes earlier, the two had greeted each other with hugs and wisecracks; the man, William “Mo” Cowan, a litigation partner at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, has been Forde’s friend and mentor throughout her years in law school. But now, she was before him in the role of lawyer, he was a judge, and for the next 40 minutes, as Forde and her co-counsel, third-year law student Brian Wong, argued a fictional federal case, the gray-walled conference room at Mintz, Levin became the chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For Forde and Wong, this was the penultimate stop on a journey that began in November and would soon take them to the national rounds of the Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition, an annual intercollegiate Supreme Court simulation sponsored by the National Black Law Students Association (NBLSA). Nearly every week for the previous six months, the pair had held similar practice sessions in law-firm conference rooms, vacant classrooms, and a few times while stuck in traffic, in Wong’s Honda Civic. Their bench was a rotating roster of faculty, lawyers, law school deans, alumni, and sitting justices who had volunteered to critique the students’ arguments. Occasionally, during sleepless nights, Forde says, she made her case to the bathroom mirror.

A month earlier, in February, at the northeast regional round of the competition, in Newark, New Jersey, Forde and Wong had competed against 38 teams, finally besting Columbia University’s contingent head-to-head to become the first Boston College team in more than two decades to take home the tournament’s first-place trophy. (In 2006, a BC team had placed third.) Now Forde and Wong were preparing for the nationals. In two days, they would board a plane to Detroit, where, for three days, four to six hours daily, they would vie for the title against 17 teams from across the country.

Each year, about 100 second-year Boston College law students compete in an internal tournament for 30 coveted third-year spots on the University’s 10 intercollegiate moot court teams. To law firms scanning résumés, participation in moot court competition can be as important as law journal experience, says assistant professor of law Maritza Karmely ’93, who co-coached the Douglass teams with associate dean for academic affairs Michael Cassidy. Unlike mock trial competitions, in which participants present evidence to a jury, moot court competitions simulate the appellate court experience: Contestants research and write a 30-page brief according to U.S. Supreme Court rules, and then argue orally before panels of judges drawn from the bench and the bar who pepper the contestants with questions.

Bianca Forde, a fast-talking New Yorker, and Brian Wong, a stoical Californian, had never worked together when they landed two of the four Boston College spots in the Douglass competition. Both had performed well as second-years in the Law School’s internal competition, and had ranked Douglass as their number one pick. Open to all members of NBLSA, the 33-year-old competition held particular appeal for the two students, who were, at the time, vice presidents, respectively, of the Boston College chapters of NBLSA and the National Asian Pacific American Law Student Association. Both Wong and Forde had hopes of pursuing careers in litigation: This fall, Wong will start as a first-year associate in employment litigation at Baker and McKenzie in Palo Alto; Forde will join the litigation department of Dewey and LeBoeuf in New York City.

Over the years, Douglass cases have dealt often with minority issues, from reparation claims for African-Americans to First Amendment protection for hate speech. This year’s case was a mock civil suit against a fictional public school system, brought by the parents of a high school student diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. At issue were two questions: 1) whether the school had violated the student’s First Amendment right to free speech by permanently suspending him for refusing to cover up an offensive T-shirt he wore on a Saturday field trip, and 2) whether the parents’ claims for compensatory and punitive damages under the Civil Rights Act could be brought in conjunction with a claim of violations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Moot cases are designed to afford equal credence to both sides of the argument, and in the Douglass competition, the teams must be prepared to argue either way (a coin toss before each round gives competitors the chance to choose). But at the regionals, says Wong, most of the losing teams turned out to have argued the same position—the petitioners’. And so he and Forde made a pact: If they made it to the regional finals and were given the opportunity to choose, they would select the petitioners’ side. The decision left their final-round opponents from Columbia wide-eyed with astonishment. But when Wong and Forde walked away with the first-place trophy, they had no regrets. “We didn’t want to win because our case was easier,” Forde says, smiling. “We wanted to win because we won.”

In the Mintz, Levin conference room overlooking Boston, Forde gripped the sides of the tabletop podium and began her last run-through. According to the contest rules, teams may divide their 40 minutes of speaking time asymmetrically. Forde and Wong split their time evenly. For both the petitioners’ and respondents’ side, Forde would argue the First Amendment issue, Wong would address the damages.

As the petitioners’ lawyer, Forde presented a three-pronged argument: First, her client’s speech could not be censored by the school because the incident took place in a public forum; second, the speech was not disruptive and did not violate others’ rights—two standards of review for First Amendment cases dictated by a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court decision; and third, the teacher’s decision constituted viewpoint discrimination, “the most egregious form,” said Forde, of First Amendment violation.

No sooner had she laid out her arguments then Cowan interrupted her. “This was not a school-sponsored trip?” he asked skeptically. “Was there anyone on the trip not from the school?”

Forde fired off a fusillade of responses: Attendance was not mandatory; the trip was irrelevant to the curriculum; in 10 years, the school had never once funded the Saturday trips.

“So we’re going to punish a school that’s short on funds?” Cowan interrupted. Cowan, a career litigator who seemed to enjoy his temporary seat on the bench, was no easier on Wong. Wong’s argument was more technical than his co-counsel’s. He would have to show that the school had deprived his client of his educational right, and that the laws invoked allowed both for compensation and punitive damages.

“Your Honor, my client did not receive appropriate help for his disability, and ultimately lost two years of education as a result of his suspension following this incident,” Wong began.

“So your solution is to punish the district by taking money that would otherwise be used for the rest of its students?” Cowan retorted.

Like Forde before him, Wong framed his argument with previous Supreme Court cases, including Morse v. Frederick (2007), in which the Court upheld an Alaska high school principal’s right to suspend a student for displaying a banner reading “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” across the street from the school. When they played the role of petitioners, Wong and Forde argued that the Morse decision did not apply in their case, as their client’s T-shirt did not advocate illegal behavior, nor did it represent the school. As defendants, however, Forde and Wong countered that Morse did apply, noting that the Court had allowed the principal to regulate student speech that took place off school grounds.

For nearly two hours, Forde and Wong argued the case, first on the petitioners’ side, then on the defendants’. When Cowan, who had returned that morning at 6 a.m. from a San Francisco business trip, finally gave a “time-up” hand signal, he looked fresher than the two law school students.

“You clearly have a great command of the law,” he said. “But don’t be afraid to speak just as forcefully with your [physical] presentation.” To Forde, his advice was to slow down (“I know you talk fast in everything you do,” he joked). To Wong, he suggested showing “a bit of indignity.” He said, “Don’t be afraid to tell the court, with your voice, with your expressions, which points they should pay attention to.” Cowan paused, and then added, “Still, you were hard to push off your game.”

“We’ve been hammered by judges on both sides,” Wong replied.

Cowan nodded and laughed. “Welcome,” he said, “to my world.”

Postscript: On March 26–30, 2008, Forde and Wong participated in the nationals in Detroit and progressed to the quarterfinal round. The tournament title went to a team from Georgetown Law School. Forde, however, was honored with one of four individual awards, earning “Best Oral Advocate,” a distinction bestowed on the competitor with the highest average oral scores for the three preliminary rounds.

Read more by Cara Feinberg