Brown,+Chris

Chris Brown Judging Philosophy General: My motto in most debates is to do what you are more comfortable with and do it well. The usual applies, extend the warrants, compare evidence, explain how your arguments interact with the other teams. Those should be givens at the varsity level of debate. Regardless if anyone says anything about it in the round I will protect the 2NR from new 2AR arguments. Card clipping will be grounds for a loss, no matter if it is me or the other team pointing it out. If you want me to call for evidence extend the cite in the last rebuttal, otherwise I will not look at it or call for it and if you don’t underline/read the warrants of the card don’t expect me to do the work for you. Theory: Don’t expect me to evaluate a theory debate in your favor if all you do is go as fast as you can, extend taglines, and lack explanation. I am not a good judge to go for theory for in front of. However, it doesn’t mean it is impossible, just that I’ve found most teams regardless of knowing how I like to see it debated, refuse to take their time and do a good job. In this case, depth is better than breadth and your debates will go a lot better in front of me if you explain why your few well developed arguments in a theory debate answer the other team’s blippy tag-lines. Topicality specifically – I probably will never vote on T, SSA=All. Other than that everything else is the same. Critiques: This is probably where I am most comfortable evaluating debates, only because my outside knowledge of the topic is greatest here and has most to do with what I study. This means that if I think you are misrepresenting an argument or someone’s philosophy, your credibility in my mind will go down and possibly speaker points. It will be very hard for you to win on a poorly developed criticism so if you are not willing to put in the time and effort explaining a critique in a round, chances are you should go for a different argument in front of me. I like to see good debates, with minimal cards and maximum thinking where the best cards are read first and the debaters develop the arguments, not the evidence they read necessarily, the rest of the round. Policy (DAs and CPs): I love a good policy debate just as much as anyone else, especially a teched out PIC and good impact analysis. I do a lot of policy work for my teams and love complicated politics and econ debates that involve a lot of analysis. If you are going for a politics DA the link and internal link analysis ie, who’s vote in congress counts, why the aff hurts chances of ‘x’ policy passing, should be developed and as detailed as possible. Political Capital is finite (seidenfeld) link arguments are not persuasive, though may be necessary. I like to see other teams point out inconsistencies in the link arguments for these debates and teams actually looking at the other team’s evidence because a lot of times politics cards will not say what the team reading them necessarily wants them to.