Where will the International Rounds of the LAWASIA International Moot Competition be held?

The International Rounds will take place in Seoul, KOR.

What level of participants is the competition designed for?

The competition is designed for college-level participants.

What is the format of the competition?

The competition involves international rounds, suggesting a format where teams from various jurisdictions compete against each other in simulated court proceedings.

21st LAWASIA International Moot Competition – International Rounds

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

Registration open

The 21st LAWASIA International Moot Competition's International Rounds will convene in Seoul, KOR. This collegiate-level event offers a platform for aspiring legal professionals to engage in simulated court proceedings, focusing on international legal principles and their application. Participants will hone their advocacy skills and deepen their understanding of complex legal issues within a competitive environment.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the dominant committee topic. Click through for the full country profile.

South Korea

Host nation, promoting legal education and international cooperation.

Role in topic

As the host country, KOR plays a pivotal role in facilitating the competition, providing the venue and logistical support. Its legal community and institutions contribute to the intellectual environment of the event, showcasing its commitment to legal education and international engagement.

Australia

Active participant in regional legal discourse.

Role in topic

AUS, as a prominent member of the LAWASIA organization, regularly sends teams to participate in the competition. Its legal traditions and academic institutions contribute significantly to the intellectual rigor and competitive spirit of the event.

Singapore

Key legal hub in Asia, contributing to international legal scholarship.

Role in topic

SGP often fields strong teams in international moot competitions, reflecting its status as a significant legal and arbitration hub in Asia. Its participation underscores the high standards of legal education and advocacy in the region.

India

Significant contributor of legal talent and diverse perspectives.

Role in topic

IND, with its vast legal system and numerous law schools, is a consistent participant in international moot competitions. Its teams bring diverse legal perspectives and a strong tradition of legal scholarship to the competition.

Topics & background

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

Contractual Interpretation in Cross-Border Commercial Disputes

Contractual interpretation sits at the heart of commercial law across Asia-Pacific jurisdictions, yet courts and tribunals continue to diverge sharply on method. Common law systems such as those of England, Singapore, Australia, and India have moved through successive refinements — from the strict 'plain meaning' rule toward the contextual approach articulated in Investors Compensation Scheme v West Bromwich (1998) and refined in Arnold v Britton (2015) and Wood v Capita (2017), which restored textual primacy while preserving commercial common sense. Civil law systems, by contrast, ground interpretation in the parties' common intention (e.g. Article 142 of China's Civil Code, Article 8 of the CISG), permitting broader reference to negotiations and conduct. The practical difficulty in international moot-style fact patterns is the collision of these methods within a single transaction: a contract governed by one law, arbitrated under another seat's procedural rules, and performed across jurisdictions with differing rules on parol evidence, implied terms, and good faith. The UNIDROIT Principles (Articles 4.1–4.8) and the CISG have attempted to harmonise these approaches, emphasising party intent, reasonableness, and the contract as a whole, but their reception remains uneven. Today the debate centres on how far tribunals may look beyond the four corners of the document — to pre-contractual negotiations, subsequent conduct, and industry usage — particularly in long-term technology and entertainment licensing agreements where commercial realities evolve faster than drafting. This forms the doctrinal backdrop against which the LAWASIA moot problem must be argued.

Key players

Performance Obligations and Remedies for Breach

Performance obligations define what each party must do, when, and to what standard — and breach of those obligations triggers the remedial architecture of contract law. Across Asia-Pacific jurisdictions, the analytical frameworks differ meaningfully: common law systems distinguish conditions, warranties, and innominate terms (Hong Kong Fir Shipping v Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, 1962), while civil law and CISG regimes operate around the concept of 'fundamental breach' (CISG Article 25) and a hierarchy of remedies privileging performance over termination. Modern disputes increasingly involve obligations that are continuous, conditional, or technologically contingent — software-as-a-service deliverables, licensing of evolving IP, and content production milestones. These raise difficult questions about anticipatory breach, the scope of force majeure and hardship (UNIDROIT Principles Articles 6.2.1–6.2.3), the duty to mitigate, and the availability of specific performance versus damages. COVID-era jurisprudence sharpened many of these issues, with courts across Singapore, India, Australia, and China issuing significant rulings on frustration and supervening impossibility. For LAWASIA mooters, the contemporary battleground is whether a party's failure goes to the root of the contract, whether cure rights have been properly exercised, and how to quantify expectation, reliance, and consequential losses in industries where the subject matter — such as emerging entertainment technologies — is itself unstable and rapidly depreciating in value.

Key players

Emerging Technologies in the Entertainment Industry

The entertainment industry across Asia-Pacific is undergoing rapid transformation driven by generative AI, immersive media, virtual production (LED-volume stages pioneered on productions like 'The Mandalorian'), volumetric capture, deepfake synthesis, and blockchain-based rights management. These technologies disrupt established legal categories: authorship and originality under copyright, personality and publicity rights, performers' rights under the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty and the 2020 Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances, and the contractual allocation of risk in production agreements. Litigation and legislation are moving quickly. The 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in the United States produced landmark contractual protections against unauthorised AI use of performer likenesses; the EU AI Act (2024) imposes transparency obligations on synthetic media; China's 2023 Generative AI Measures and 2022 Deep Synthesis Provisions require labelling and consent for synthetic likenesses; and Indian, Japanese, and Korean courts have grappled with deepfake misuse of celebrity images. Meanwhile, copyright offices in the US, China, and elsewhere have issued divergent rulings on whether AI-assisted works attract protection. For entertainment contracts, the live questions concern who owns AI-generated outputs, how training-data clearances are warranted, how performer consent and compensation are structured for digital replicas, and which jurisdiction's law governs cross-border streaming and licensing — all squarely relevant to a moot problem set against this industry backdrop.

Key players

AI-Generated Holography: Rights, Consent, and Liability

AI-generated holography fuses three converging technologies: generative AI models capable of synthesising photorealistic likenesses, volumetric and light-field display systems, and motion-capture or archival data used to 'resurrect' or simulate performers. High-profile uses — the 2012 Tupac Coachella projection, the ABBA Voyage avatars, posthumous tours featuring Whitney Houston and Roy Orbison, and growing K-pop deployment of holographic concerts — have outpaced the law. The core legal issues span copyright in the underlying audiovisual works, performers' rights, posthumous personality and publicity rights (which vary dramatically: robust in California and several Indian states, narrower or non-existent elsewhere), moral rights, and consumer-protection concerns about deceptive synthetic media. The 2020 Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances strengthened performers' control over fixations of their performances, but its application to AI-generated holograms not derived from a single fixation remains contested. China's deep-synthesis rules, the EU AI Act's labelling regime, and emerging US state laws (Tennessee's ELVIS Act 2024, New York's posthumous right of publicity) signal a regulatory turn toward consent-based frameworks. Courts in India have granted injunctions protecting living celebrities from AI-generated likeness misuse, while estates of deceased performers increasingly assert contractual and statutory control over holographic revivals. The contemporary dispute landscape — and the likely terrain of the LAWASIA moot — concerns who must consent to a hologram performance, how royalties flow, whether the hologram itself attracts a separate copyright, and how cross-border touring of a synthetic performer is governed when the underlying personality, the technology licensor, the producer, and the venue sit in different jurisdictions.

Key players