III INITIATIVES: IAN FLETCHER MOOT
Building the Labyrinth: Drafting the Ian Fletcher International Insolvency Law Moot
By Ishana Tripathi
As we inch towards the tenth year of establishment of the ' Fletcher Moot ', a look back at the origins of the only cross-border and international insolvency moot is a good start. The moot was established in 2017 as the first-ever of its kind, by INSOL International and the International Insolvency Institute, and named to honour Professor Ian Fletcher, Q. C., of University College London.
Every year, since its establishment in 2017, law students around the world team up to dissect, engage and immerse themselves in detangling a hypothetical case with contractual and legal complexities that, have with the adoption and case use of the Model Law on Cross Border
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Insolvency 1997( Model Law), have seen consistent change. The legal framework that has evolved over the years since has also required an upskilling of minds that put the problem to solve on paper for the next generation of insolvency lawyers that have cross-jurisdictional and international insolvency at the centre of legal practice. The legal framework today is dynamic, and over time drafting the problem for the Fletcher Moot is less like writing a legal brief and has become more like designing an escape room: every clue must be discoverable, every door must open onto a genuine question of law, and no issue can be a dead end.
The Laws, The System and The Cases at Nuzilia
Here, the evolving landscape of the moot problem is also a testament to the scope of the
law. The inaugural problem was comparatively narrow in scope: a dispute in the fictional jurisdiction of“ Nuzilia” turning on recognition of a foreign main versus non-main proceeding, drawn entirely from the Model Law, which was at that time the only general-purpose insolvency Model Law in existence. That narrowness was a product of the law itself, not a lack of ambition.
The Model Law, at the time, was built to answer a single-debtor question: how should a court in one country treat an insolvency proceeding opened in another? It had no specific mechanism for what happens when an entire corporate group collapses across borders at once— a gap exposed by the 2008 Lehman Brothers failure, which involved more than 100 affiliated entities filing insolvency proceedings in over 16 jurisdictions, coordinated only through an improvised, non-binding protocol among administrators. The drafters of the Model Law spent the following decade closing that gap: a Model Law on Recognition and Enforcement of Insolvency-Related Judgments followed in 2018, and then, in 2019, the Model Law on Enterprise Group Insolvency( MLEGI), which codified and built on the cooperation principles improvised in the Lehman protocol. Over time, the drafters of the moot problem absorbed each addition into the competition almost as soon as it existed. Within a few years of the 2019 text, the standard Fletcher Moot fact pattern had shifted from a single insolvent company to a fictional jurisdiction that had adopted both the Model Law and the MLEGI— with recent editions that expected to draw on both texts together, along with their respective guides to enactment. That shift changed
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