Sachs,+Sarah

I debated four years for the College Preparatory School in Oakland, Ca. I cleared at the TOC and qualified to the TOC twice. My senior year I was in finals of Berkeley and NDCA and won St. Marks, Stanford, and the Hockaday Women’s RR.


 * Disclaimer:** All my opinions are merely what I like to see in debates, not the only things that I will vote on. There are very few arguments I reject on face.


 * Speaks:** In cx, I enjoy when debaters are aggressive for strategic purposes. For example, if you’re pinning a shifty-shady debater to an advocacy in cross x, I think aggression is encouraged. But if you yelling at a novice, asking for them to concede to your theory violation, I will be less pleased. I award speaks based on the quality of the tournament, a 30 being someone who could win the tournament and represents the best in the pool. I will not be very receptive to theory shells that ask me to give you a 30.


 * Paradigm:** I default to a truth testing paradigm, however if you’d like to suggest I view the round differently, by all means you can run arguments for comparative worlds, etc. I am not convinced that you can’t read a plan or utilitarianism under truth testing. I think most debaters think these paradigms play a greater role in most debates than they actually do.

I never really enjoyed theory debates because I found a majority of them to be superfluous, generic, and poorly developed. However, I do enjoy specifically crafted interpretations that are framed deliberately to answer your opponents arguments. I think a lot of the time theory should really just be a reason to reject the argument and I look for well warranted arguments in the voter for why it’s a reason to reject the debater. Unless told otherwise, I presume reasonability but I think there are many convincing arguments for competing interpretations. I hold debaters to the exact text of their interpretations. I don’t believe that debaters can get out of “I-meets” because they argue about what the “sense” of the interpretation is. I also am very supportive of RVIs and I think that when theory is a voter it should be an issue of norms creation, which would seem to imply that the best norm (which may be a counter-interpretation) should win the round. Thus, I am VERY lenient to arguments for why well-justified offensive counter-interps are sufficient for RVIs or meta-theory arguments for why RVIs should be presumed to be true in debate. However, because not all debaters read this paradigm and this is a somewhat unconventional view, debaters still need to justify these arguments. Moreover, there are many reasonable objections to these arguments that I will certainly listen to and vote for.
 * Theory:**

As for critical arguments, I ran these a lot as a debater. However, I would certainly not define myself as someone who will hack for arguments. My reason for saying this is that when I ran critical positions, I had to spend a lot of time learning them and understanding them. Just because you know that I read a Nietzsche NC last year does not mean that you don’t need to explain your Foucault K. I will be just as confused as any other judge and will not vote for you if you don’t justify it as extensively as you should. I really like it when debaters use critical arguments strategically. Creative strategies like counter-ks or epistemological indicts are really fun for me and your speaks will be rewarded accordingly.
 * Critical/Philosophical Arguments:** As a debater, I loved really dense critical or philosophical positions. This is not to say that I am expert on these topics. I have been exposed briefly lot of different philosophy and really enjoy it but I am not a philosophy major in college and do not know the total depths of most philosophies. However, if the theory is explained in the ac, I really enjoy seeing how philosophy can become interestingly used to create strategic positions with a clear story.

- I am completely fine voting for micro-political positions but often times I feel that debaters don’t do enough work connecting their arguments to the ballot. Similarly, if you’d like me to vote on something other than the resolution, I’m also okay with that, you just need to tell me why I should. - I am not the judge to run “your author is a racist” or “your argument endorses the Holocaust” in front of. If you run these arguments, expect very low speaks. However, if you do actually debate something that endorses the Holocaust and you give reasons why that logic is incredibly incorrect and stupid, expect very high speaks. Actually use your advocacy skills instead of claiming that your opponent needs them. - I don’t presume either way. If no one has any offense and no one argues for presumption, then I will be forced to choose based on who did the “better debating” - I will give you VERY low speaks and have a very high threshold for voting on disclosure theory, flip theory, and violations garnered from something that happened out of round-- The two exceptions are probably disclosure theory against a plan or theory that says that your opponent can’t read arguments antithetical to theory shells they’ve read in the past
 * Other Thoughts:**

Finally, I have the right to gut check on issues and vote you down if you are being excessively offensive or rude.