Where will the 21st LAWASIA International Moot Competition be held?

The competition will be held in Seoul, KOR.

What is the eligibility level for participants in this competition?

The competition is open to college-level participants.

What is the format of the competition?

The competition involves both written submissions and oral advocacy phases.

21st LAWASIA International Moot Competition 2026

Sep 13–16, 2026Seoul, South KoreaIn-person

Registration open

The 21st LAWASIA International Moot Competition is scheduled to take place in Seoul, KOR. This event offers college-level participants an opportunity to engage with complex legal issues in a competitive moot court setting. The competition is designed to foster legal research, argumentation, and presentation skills among aspiring legal professionals. Participants will delve into a challenging moot problem, requiring them to analyze intricate legal scenarios and develop persuasive arguments. The competition format emphasizes both written submissions and oral advocacy, providing a comprehensive experience in international legal practice.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the dominant committee topic. Click through for the full country profile.

South Korea

Host nation, providing a significant platform for international legal discourse and showcasing its legal infrastructure.

Role in topic

As the host country, KOR provides the venue for this international competition, facilitating the gathering of legal minds from various nations. Its legal system and academic institutions contribute to the intellectual environment of the event, and its position in Asia makes it a central hub for regional legal discussions.

United States

A major contributor to international legal scholarship and a frequent participant in global moot court competitions.

Role in topic

The USA, with its robust legal education system and significant influence on international law, often fields strong teams in such competitions. Its legal traditions and scholarly contributions frequently inform the arguments and interpretations presented by participants, particularly in areas of common law and international jurisprudence.

Japan

An active participant in international legal forums, contributing to diverse perspectives in legal argumentation.

Role in topic

JPN's engagement in international law, particularly in areas such as trade and human rights, means its legal students bring valuable perspectives to the competition. Their approach to legal reasoning and interpretation often reflects a blend of civil law traditions and international legal norms.

China

A rising power in international law, with increasing participation and influence in global legal discourse.

Role in topic

CHN's growing role in international affairs and its unique legal system offer distinct viewpoints in legal debates. Participation from CHN teams highlights the evolving landscape of international law and the integration of diverse legal philosophies within global legal education.

Singapore

A prominent legal hub in Asia, known for its strong legal education and active involvement in international legal matters.

Role in topic

SGP is recognized for its sophisticated legal system and its commitment to international law. Teams from SGP are often well-prepared, reflecting the country's emphasis on legal excellence and its role as a regional center for dispute resolution and legal innovation.

Topics & background

The history behind each committee topic and the states that shape it.

AI-Generated Holography: Intellectual Property and Liability in Synthetic Media

Holography has evolved from a niche optical technology developed by Dennis Gabor in 1947 into a commercially significant medium used in entertainment, security printing, medical imaging, and live performance. Recent advances in generative AI have enabled the synthesis of three-dimensional holographic imagery from text prompts, photographs, and motion-capture data, lowering production costs and enabling posthumous or unauthorized recreations of performers. High-profile concert holograms of deceased artists, AI-driven volumetric capture studios, and the integration of generative models into AR/XR pipelines have all sharpened legal questions around authorship, personality rights, and consumer deception. The legal landscape across the Asia-Pacific is fragmented. Common law jurisdictions rely on a patchwork of copyright, passing-off, and tort doctrines, while civil law systems such as Japan and South Korea recognize stronger personality and publicity rights. The United States has seen state-level right-of-publicity statutes (notably California and Tennessee's 2024 ELVIS Act) extended to AI likenesses, while the EU AI Act imposes transparency duties on synthetic media. China's 2023 Deep Synthesis Provisions and Generative AI Measures require labelling and consent for synthetic likenesses. There is, however, no harmonized international standard, and disputes increasingly arise over cross-border streaming of AI-generated holographic performances. For mooters, the central doctrinal questions concern who owns the copyright in AI-generated holographic works when training data includes protected performances, whether unauthorized holographic recreations infringe personality rights or constitute misleading conduct under consumer protection statutes, and how choice-of-law rules apply when a hologram is generated in one jurisdiction, hosted in another, and projected in a third.

Key players

Contractual Interpretation in Cross-Border Commercial Disputes

Contractual interpretation sits at the heart of commercial litigation and arbitration across the Asia-Pacific, yet jurisdictions diverge sharply in approach. English and Commonwealth courts have moved through Investors Compensation Scheme v West Bromwich (1998), Rainy Sky v Kookmin (2011), Arnold v Britton (2015), and Wood v Capita (2017), refining a unitary exercise that balances textualism and contextualism. Australian courts in Codelfa and Mount Bruce Mining have maintained a narrower ambiguity gateway to extrinsic evidence, while Singapore's Zurich Insurance v B-Gold framework expressly admits context. Civil law systems, including Japan, Korea, and Indonesia, instead emphasise good faith and the true common intention of the parties under their civil codes. The rise of cross-border supply chains, standard-form digital contracts, and multilingual drafting has multiplied interpretive disputes. Translation discrepancies, incorporation of foreign general conditions, and clauses drafted by AI tools raise fresh questions about the parol evidence rule, the role of pre-contractual negotiations, and the relevance of post-contractual conduct. The CISG (Article 8) and the UNIDROIT Principles offer a partially harmonised approach centred on the parties' intent and reasonable understanding, but their uptake varies, and many Asia-Pacific contracts still elect English or New York law. Key doctrinal flashpoints include the admissibility of subjective intent evidence, the treatment of entire agreement and no-oral-modification clauses, the use of commercial common sense to rewrite apparently clear language, and the interpretive weight given to recitals, schedules, and incorporated industry codes. Mooters should be ready to argue across textualist, contextualist, and good-faith paradigms.

Key players

Performance Obligations in International Commercial Contracts

Performance obligations — the substantive duties parties owe each other under a contract — have become a central battleground as global supply chains face pandemic disruption, geopolitical sanctions, climate-related events, and rapid technological change. Doctrines of frustration, force majeure, hardship, and impossibility have been tested by COVID-19 shutdowns, the war in Ukraine, Red Sea shipping disruptions, and export controls on semiconductors. Courts and tribunals have had to decide when non-performance is excused, when contracts must be renegotiated, and how risk allocation clauses interact with mandatory law. Divergent regimes complicate cross-border practice. English law applies a narrow frustration doctrine and treats force majeure as purely contractual, while CISG Article 79 provides a uniform impediment defence and the UNIDROIT Principles recognise hardship and a duty to renegotiate. Chinese contract law under the Civil Code (2021) codifies both force majeure and change of circumstances. Common-law Asia-Pacific jurisdictions have litigated the scope of "hindrance" and "prevention" clauses, while civil-law systems have leaned on good faith to adjust performance. Sanctions compliance has also introduced new species of legal impossibility that may or may not excuse payment, delivery, or service obligations. Key questions for the moot include the threshold for invoking force majeure versus hardship, the duty to mitigate and to give notice, the interaction between performance obligations and evolving regulatory duties (such as ESG, human-rights due diligence, and AI compliance), and the remedies available — termination, suspension, price adjustment, or specific performance — when external shocks render performance commercially unviable but not literally impossible.

Key players

Emerging Technologies in the Entertainment Industry

The entertainment industry is being reshaped by generative AI, virtual production, blockchain-based rights management, immersive XR experiences, and AI-driven recommendation systems. The 2023 Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes crystallised concerns about AI scriptwriting and digital replicas of performers, leading to landmark WGA and SAG-AFTRA agreements requiring consent and compensation for AI use. In Asia, K-pop agencies, Japanese anime studios, Bollywood producers, and Chinese streaming platforms are deploying AI dubbing, voice cloning, virtual influencers, and synthetic actors at scale, raising parallel questions about consent, residuals, and authorship. The legal response is uneven. The EU AI Act and China's generative AI rules impose transparency and labelling duties; the US relies on a mix of copyright (the Copyright Office's 2023–2025 guidance denying registration to purely AI-generated works), right-of-publicity statutes, and emerging federal proposals such as the NO FAKES Act. Japan has taken a comparatively permissive stance on AI training under Article 30-4 of its Copyright Act, while Korea and Singapore are developing sector-specific guidance. Blockchain and NFT-based distribution models continue to test the boundaries of licensing, secondary-market royalties, and consumer protection. For mooters, the key issues include who owns copyright in AI-assisted works, how performers' likeness and voice rights survive into the AI era, the enforceability of digital-replica clauses across jurisdictions, platform liability for synthetic content, and the interaction between technology-neutral copyright doctrines and rapidly evolving production tools. Cross-border streaming amplifies conflict-of-laws problems where content lawful in one market is infringing or unlawful in another.

Key players