Co-op Student Wins in Moot Court

Co-op High School senior, Najeem Abubakar, argued and won his hypothetical case that teachers and school staff should be legally allowed to search students’ cell phones, despite claims of privacy violations.  The case was tried at the National Moot Court Competition in Washington D.C. in late March, after months of intensive legal coaching from students at Yale Law School, as part of the Marshall-Brennan Project, in which law students teach 25 participating high school students to understand and protect their constitutional rights.
In the hypothetical case—Marshall Brennan v. Capital City School District—a school security guard looked through a student’s bag and then her cell phone, suspecting her of possessing drugs. He found confidential medical information by opening an app on the phone. The student had taken the school to court and lost.  Abubakar represented the school on the student’s appeal. Yale Law students Adam Saltzman and Michael Zucker had been working with the group since January, pulling similar real state cases for Co-op kids to review and draw from to build their cases.  
Abubakar studied every free minute he had prior to the competition—on the train and in his hotel room the night before the moot trial competition.  He is the third Co-op senior in a row to win the annual national competition.