Rogerson,+Paul

I debated 4 years in high school at New Trier and briefly for Berkeley; I now coach for James Logan high school. My main belief when judging is that the debate is up to the debaters – I have no special reservations about any particular argument or style of debate, and I went for almost every type of argument when I debated, from the XO counterplan to Baudrillard. I will generally try to judge the debate in accordance with (what I think are) the usual practices and expectations of the community – debates are evaluated line-by-line, dropped arguments are generally given a high truth value, etc. – which is not to say that those standards cannot become a topic of debate. I think that it’s great to be confident in debates, but there’s no reason to be discourteous or unkind to the other team. I won’t vote against you for doing that, but you can expect to see it reflected in your speaker points.

Although my goal is to judge the debate objectively and not allow my biases or personal preferences to enter into the decision, in practice it’s impossible to completely escape them. In that vein, here are some things I think it might be useful to know:

(1) I was a 2A for almost all of my debate career, which I think affects my instincts in a couple cases. In particular, I think I’m less hostile to theory debates than some judges and more willing to take defensive arguments seriously.

(2) I think I place an unusually high value on clarity and explanation of arguments. An example of what I mean is that I think I’m unusually willing to vote for analytic arguments over evidence if I think the analytic arguments are better. Having evidence is great, but if the other team has better explained or better argued reasons why a piece of evidence is wrong, I’m often inclined to prefer those reasons even if they’re analytic.