MOOTING TRIP TO CHEROKEE
THOMAS SAUNDERS & THOMAS MALLON
Mooting Trip to Cherokee Thomas Saunders was Called to the Bar in 2019, having completed the Bar course with the support of the Inn’s Nicholas Pumfrey Memorial Scholarship. He is currently a pupil at Keating Chambers, where he will begin tenancy in September 2020.
Thomas Mallon was born in San Francisco and educated in the UK. He was Called to the Bar in 2019, with the kind assistance of the Inn’s Quatercentenary Scholarship. He is currently undertaking pupillage.
A long time ago (last September, while the planes were still flying) and in a land far away, a band of intrepid Middle Templars girded up their loins and ventured into the heat and the mists and the mountains. Under the auspicious leadership of Master Treasurer (Master David Bean), Master Richard Wilmot-Smith and Christa Richmond, we had conducted a whistle-stop tour of the state, taking in the University at Chapel Hill, the pretty eastern town of Edenton and the State Supreme Court at Raleigh (named after a Middle Templar, Sir Walter Raleigh). After a series of hard-fought and highly competitive moots against the North Americans, each one undoubtedly a score draw, we were on our way west – to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the border with Tennessee. From Chapel Hill we made our way to Asheville (where we ate ‘grits’ and drank whiskey at a bluegrass session) and from there up into the Smoky Mountains themselves, to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Qualla Boundary. As we emerged from atop a swell of green to enter the Qualla Boundary, it was clear why the Cherokee had picked this spot to resist the United States forced removal of their people. It is a natural fortress, a deep valley walled by old mountains. At first glance, however, there is little to distinguish the reservation from other parts of Appalachia. An old gas station sits comfortably at the main intersection; we pass an all-you-can-eat buffet called Momma’s. The phrase ‘a tourist in one’s own country’ is usually deployed in service of the kitsch, quaint, or picturesque. One sees visions of the city-slicker in the country village, or the journalist in the run-down sea-side resort. For one of
The group gathered in Raleigh
us, however, the phrase had taken on an unexpected literalism. The Mallon side of this article’s authorship equation is, in fact, American – and as foreign as your Californian representative had found North Carolina, he was now in a place which was, if not a foreign state or quite a foreign nation, an independent legal system. Our first stop is the still new Anthony Edward Lossiah Justice Center, built in 2014 at a cost of $26 million. We pass under the portrait of Anthony Lossiah himself, a
In the Supreme Court in Raleigh
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