Mock Trial

It was so exciting when the high school mock trial team from Abington Heights, the Pennsylvania champion from the March 2024 statewide finals,  won the 2024 National High School Mock Trial Championship in Wilmington, Delaware in early May.  It may have even been more exciting for the students and their coaches when they visited President Biden at the White House at the start of the summer.

But the team from Abington Heights would have never made it to the White House if not for Temple-LEAP's nearly 45-year history with mock trial. The mission of the Law, Education and Participation Project of the Temple University School of Law  (Temple-LEAP) has always been to educate non-lawyers, particularly K-12 students from Philadelphia area schools, about the law and citizenship. Started in 1974, LEAP reaches these goals by teaching about principles of democracy while developing critical reading, writing and thinking skills. Mock trial is LEAP's enduring signature program. LEAP's first high school mock trial efforts started circa 1979 using problems from the then National Institute for Citizenship Education in the Law (NICEL) now known as Street Law.

The Pennsylvania Bar Association is the force behind today's Pennsylvania Statewide High School Mock Trial Competition.  The PBA, under the leadership of then PBA staffer Camille Kostelac-Cherry, brought the program statewide from its Philadelphia roots in 1984, using the national Street Law program's problems that LEAP promoted.  The first "original" cases were written in 1987.  

In the early years of the statewide competition, Temple-LEAP law students wrote the problems. In this century, Paul Kaufman and Jonathan Grode (a Temple Law alum) stand out as the stars of mock trial drafting. Grode and Kaufman have cowritten the Pennsylvania problems since 2011, and they co-wrote the national problems in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2024. Grode also adapted and modified the 2007 mock trial problem and wrote the 2008, 2009, and 2010 mock trial problems.  

Kaufman is a mock trial legend, a four-time Delaware state champion mock trialer in high school and currently the Chair of the National competition.  However, Temple alum Grode is the true rock star of the program.  More than 3000 high schoolers across the Commonwealth look forward each year to the adventures they will explore from the November release of the problem to the March statewide championships, as the citizens of Wisawe, the fictional Laurel County (also fictional) of Pennsylvania (not fictional) deal with the mayhem that finds them every year in court.  Grode created the town and the county; mock trial has never been the same since!

LEAP kicked off its 50th anniversary celebration with a lunch on Thursday, June 20, 2024 at the Inn at Swarthmore, a location picked to honor John S. Bradway, the creator of clinical law school clinics, who grew up there in the early part of the 20th century.  Bradway donated the money that LEAP has used to fund the Philadelphia mock trials for nearly 30 years, today called the John S. Bradway Philaelphia High School Mock Trial Competition. Two of LEAP's Executive Directors, Beth Farnbach and David Keller  Trevaskis, lived in Swarthmore and the late Edgar Cahn, whose timebanking youth court in Washington, D.C. inspired the ongoing youth court effort in Pennsylvania today (Youth court, like mock trial, started at LEAP and was picked up by the PBA and promoted statewide), went to Swarthmore College, adding to the connection. Plus the food is great! 

Pictured are, front row, left to right, Roberta West, who worked 25 years at LEAP and ran the mock trial program from 2001 to 2014 (a Temple Law alum, she still frequently scores at the statewide finals), Beth Earley Farnbach, LEAP's ED from 1975 to 1993 (she started the mock trials in 1979 or so), and Marcia Halbert, Philadelphia School District Museum Educator whose museum was City Hall and who brought tens of thousands of kids to Court to see live trials (she is also the widow of Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Marvin Halbert, with whom she supported LEAP and mock trial throughout her career).

Standing in the middle row,  left to right are Bruce Yasgur, retired Central High social studies teacher, mock trial coach and Temple Law alum; Brian Pollock, a longtime Fels High School mock trial and debate coach; and Alan Liebowitz, a Temple Law alum and retired educator who first got involved with LEAP in the 70's when he was teaching middle school social studies at Roosevelt and took an in-service class.  He later coached mock trial and still scores for the statewide finals each year.

Standing in the back row, left to right, Bob Catina, part of LEAP's statewide law-related education training team, retired from Pleasant Valley High School where he coached three statewide final four teams in the early years of the PBA's mock trial competition (he still scores at the finals today) working as a court crier for the Monroe County Courts; Sarah Kaufman, the coordinator of the John S. Bradway Philadelphia High School Mock Trial Competition since 2014 (and a Temple Law alum), and David Keller Trevaskis, another temple Law alum who worked for LEAP for 17 years and ran the program from 1993 until 2001, when he moved to the PBA, and who has been part of the statewide mock trial committee since the 1990s.

LEAP is just beginning a year of celebration for its 50^th birthday and mock trial will be a recurring story.  Check out https://pcssonline.org/leap/ to see the youngest federal judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania highlighted for her high school mock trial skill in a New York Times article, plus pictures and stories from many who have had the privilege of being part of the joy that is mock trial.

As the year of LEAP's 50th continues, we hope to have many wonderful celebrations, large and small.