NYU Law team wins space law moot court world championship

On October 7, a team of NYU Law students—Elyse Cox ’27, Jacqueline Stark LLM ’25, and Denis McGrath ’27—emerged as victors in the world finals in the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court for 2025. Their win marked a first for NYU Law in the competition, and it was also the first Manfried Lachs world championship for a North American team in more than a decade.

The students’ journey to becoming international champions began during McGrath’s 1L year, when he learned that NYU Law had once had a Space Law Society, which had gone dormant during the COVID-19 pandemic. “So step number one was trying to bring the Space Law Society back to NYU, which I did with the help of [Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law] Benedict Kingsbury, who’s our faculty sponsor,” McGrath says. When McGrath spoke with Law School alumni who had been earlier members of the Space Law Society, one alum mentioned the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court as a potential focus for the revived organization.

Next, McGrath recruited Cox and Stark for the moot court team. “It was very much me promising the two of them that we would go to a fun international law moot court conference and then finding out later what exactly that entailed,” says McGrath. For Cox, it would be her first time on a moot court team. Stark, who had previous experience at international law moot court competitions, says that space law interests her because of the possibility of applying international law to novel scenarios that have not yet unfolded in the real world. “There is no state, there is no land in space, and there’s no concept of ownership. So it is a really fascinating time,” Stark says.

After winning the North American regional competition in Washington, DC last spring, the team advanced to the two-round international championship, held in Sydney, Australia. First, the NYU Law students bested Singapore Management University, the reigning champions. In the final round, they faced and defeated a team from the University of Luxembourg, arguing before three justices from the International Court of Justice: Judge Peter Tomka of Slovakia, Judge Bogdan-Lucian Aurescu of Romania, and Judge Dire Tladi of South Africa.

The students say that the moot court problems they were tasked with resolving, while hypothetical, were rooted in real contemporary issues arising in space law today. “This year was very inspired by what’s happening in Ukraine with Elon Musk providing internet [via Starlink satellites] to the Ukrainians,” says Stark. At this year’s competition, they dealt with issues of responsibility and liability in international law for states and private companies interacting with satellites or using their own [satellites] for telecommunications purposes in armed conflict.

“I think this is part of what makes it so interesting is that there aren’t answers to any of these questions,” says McGrath. Hypothetical solutions from moot court could shape real solutions as the space industry grows, he says. “I came home with the business cards of the legal counsel for the Japanese space agency, the Brazilian space agency, and they’re coming up to us after these competitions and saying, ‘These are things that we think about all the time, and it’s great to hear your arguments, because we want to be able to know how people are going to think about this so that we can address our own behavior [going forward,]’” McGrath says.

His own interest in space law is longstanding. McGrath notes that in applying to law school, he wrote his personal statement on space law. “I see it as a really fascinating opportunity to develop a new legal system and precedents that are more equal and just than the ones that we currently have here on Earth,” McGrath says. Part of his interest in challenging Earth-based precedents is shaped by his own experiences with accessibility and disability rights as a person with a disability, he says: “I’m actually writing a research paper right now challenging the legality of NASA’s physical disability requirements and their blanket exclusion of any astronauts with physical disabilities because it’s based on an assumption of physical performance in the Earth environment. But when you go into other types of different gravity environments, or zero gravity environments, the same disabilities that we perceive as being weaknesses or challenges here on Earth are actually benefits, potentially, in some of those other sorts of space environments.”

The team encountered a few surprises in their time at the tournament. Cox says that the moot court experience underlined for her how oral argument can help hone an advocate’s case.  “Some things that you are totally fine putting down on paper, [but] when you are trying to defend in front of a judge who knows their stuff and is going to be asking you questions…some things fall away. They’re no longer plausible. And so you have to find alternates.… That was a really interesting process,” she says.

McGrath says that, despite their victory, he was shocked by how the United States appears to lag in the field of space law. “I was so amazed and impressed by students from countries where English is not their first language, and they are making incredible arguments and clearly have wrestled with the facts and were putting forth arguments that I hadn’t even wrapped my mind around yet.… It’s not necessarily representative of entire legal systems, but there are other parts of the world that are really engaging heavily with these topics and investing a lot of time and money and research into advancing and [getting to] the top of their fields. And that’s not the case here [in the US],” he says.

The team members say that their win would not have been possible without the help of their coaches and student support team: Yirong Sun, Kaiwen Pan LLM ’25, Anna Kohlasch ’27, and Shelby Hobohm ’27. Sun, who works with Kingsbury as a research assistant, served as a faculty coach; Pan was as the moot court director; and Kolash served as a student coach who accompanied the team to their competitions. Reflecting on the preparation process, McGrath says, “Kaiwen stayed up until—I kid you not—3 a.m. on a Saturday when we were trying to submit our written memorial…. At 2:55, the three of us are all dead, and Kaiwen is still pushing through, trying to make sure that every single period was in the right place. The community at the school is what allowed us to do something remarkable that I don’t think any one of us thought was possible when we first started doing this moot court competition.”