Three students from WHU clinched second place in the Asia-Pacific Rounds of the "Manfred Lachs International Space Law Moot Court Competition 2019", held at Amity Law School in India. Teams from forty-seven countries participated in this competition. The Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition is held every year by the International Institute of Space Law (IISL), and it aims to prepare students to become space lawyers.

The Chinese team was comprised of three WHU graduate students, Chen Jiangnan, Lu Xiaorong and Liu Jiachen, and they entered the competition under the guidance of Su Jinyuan, a professor of Xi'an Jiaotong University and Ying Yaohui, a final year WHU graduate student. Liu Jiachen is a first year graduate student while Chen Jiangnan and Lu Xiaorong are both second year graduate students from the school of law.

WHU team posing with their runner-up award

The team defeated India, Australia and other teams in the preliminary rounds and made their way to the final round, where they competed with the team from the National University of Singapore. The competition was fierce and the WHU team came second by a narrow margin. The competition dealt with the ownership of lunar facility on the moon and its liabilities. Speaking of her experience at the competition, Jiachen said, ”All the participants had to work on their document-writing skills. During the oral training, we had to maintain a certain pace, constantly face new problems and improve ourselves.”

The three students all demonstrated excellent legal prowess in analyzing the case based on jurisdiction, entity and litigation qualification. The result of this competition yet again shows WHU’s excellent standing in international competitions.