Third-year students hold two hearings this Friday on lawsuits caused by problems with agricultural boundaries
At the voice of “public hearing” the Judicial Classroom of the Faculty of Law of the University of Murcia (UMU) started up this Friday morning, a space set up on the Merced Campus as a faithful reproduction of a room of hearings, in which the students of this career will be able to exercise reproducing real lawsuits that have already been tried by the courts of the Region. “With this practice room, our Law School is fully entering the 21st century”, said the professor of Procedural Law Julio Sigüenza, the main promoter and ‘alma mater’ of this project together with his close collaborator, Professor José Ignacio Martínez Pallarés, who have had the invaluable support of the rector José Luján. The magistrate Joaquín Ángel de Domingo and the dean of the Murcia prosecutors, María Dolores Cantó, acted as ‘godparents’ in this premiere.
Convinced that there is no better way to learn to walk than to move one leg behind the other, and that no theoretical teaching on Procedural Law can surpass the experience of actively participating in a ‘real’ lawsuit, Professors Sigüenza and Martínez Pallarés have prepared in recent weeks with great rigor and enthusiasm the two views that were held on this first day. Both were a procedure of declaration on property rights, derived from a conflict between farmers over the boundaries between their plots, and in which groups of three students (two lawyers and a solicitor) acted as plaintiffs and defendants. The two teams had five days to, the first, present the claim and, the second, to answer it. Finally, on the day of this Friday the hearings were held, in which several students acted as witnesses and another three were constituted as the court that must pass judgment on these wrongs.
Matters were not easy. It was a matter of determining, in one of the cases, if the reason was assisted by an orchard who claimed to have opened an access road to his farm through the area where a row of orange trees used to be, and that apparently he was being used without any authorization. by a neighbor of the plot, or if he, as he claimed in the response to the demand, had also contributed to opening that path by removing in turn a row of lemon trees from his property, so that access would be common domain.
“This is a tremendously positive initiative. Being able to participate in one of these practices, reproducing a view in a room, makes the teaching of Procedural Law more accessible and enjoyable, ”confirmed the student Josep Tramunt while he was wearing the toga that put him in the role of lawyer for the defendant . And although he admitted to being a bit affected by stage fright, he took it with a certain humor: “This is like learning to swim by throwing yourself into a pool.”
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