Some of the country’s top law school students will be on both sides of a mock murder trial about the fatal shooting of a law school dean in his office as the sixth annual University at Buffalo Law School’s national mock trial competition gets under way Friday in the Buffalo City Court building.

Students from 32 law schools in 16 states will be competing in the Buffalo- Niagara National Mock Trial Competition, which has developed into the largest such competition for law school students in the country.

Erie County Judge Thomas P. Franczyk, competition director and co-director of the Trial Advocacy program at UB Law School, said more than 150 local lawyers and judges have volunteered to serve as evaluators at the 73 trials that will be staged during the competition, which will run through Monday.

Franczyk said the scenario for this year’s mock trial case was drafted by Travis Lewin, his former Syracuse Law School trial team coach.

Under Lewin’s scripts, the “defendant” is a law professor who was the rival of the murdered dean for the attentions of a popular law school coed who was at the top of her class but also was carrying on affairs at different times with different professors, the judge said in describing the plot. “You’ve got a dead dean, a femme fatale and a slew of suspects to go around, and Professor Lewis assured me the fact pattern is entirely fictional,” Franczyk said.

The competition begins with a welcoming breakfast Friday morning in the City Court building. There will be an awards banquet Saturday night in Pettibones Grille at Coca-Cola Field. The championship round will be at 2 p. m. Monday in the second-floor ceremonial courtroom at 92 Franklin St., Franczyk said.

State Supreme Court Justice Kevin M. Dillon, a UB Law School evidence professor, will be the presiding judge at the championship trial.

After the final round, a Best Advocate Award will be presented in honor of Matthew J. Schnirel, a 2008 UB Law graduate and former UB Law trial team member who died in a plane crash earlier this year while returning home from Ohio, Franczyk said.

In addition to a team from UB Law, teams competing will be from Fordham, Pace, St. John’s, Syracuse, Barry, Florida Coastal, Nova Southeastern, Chicago-Kent, Illinois, John Marshall, Duquesne, Temple, Thomas Jefferson, Widener of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Georgia State, Northern Kentucky and St. Mary’s.

Also South Texas, Connecticut, Pacific- McGeorge, Cumberland, Campbell, Faulkner, Creighton, Widener of Delaware, Wisconsin, Akron, Thomas Cooley, Michigan State, American and Catholic of Washington, D. C.

Duquesne University School of Law won last year’s tournament, beating the University of Akron in the final trial.