Lemuel,+Joel

=**__Judge Philosophy (Updated 11/3/14)__ **=

 I have been involved with competitive policy debate in some fashion for the last 15 years. I competed all the way through high school through college and I have coached middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college students. I have experience judging in urban debate leagues as well as the national circuit. To a large extent, I think my participation in policy debate was a formative experience that impacted many different facets of my life. I am currently working towards a doctoral degree in communication and my focus is on the intersection of argumentation and rhetoric. My philosophy on judging debates is profoundly influenced by that training. This philosophy may be longer than most and it’s still incomplete. **If you are pressed for time jump to the takeaways under each topic/section.**

**__Speaker Points__**

I used to think a 28 indicated a good speaker and a 27 indicated an average speaker. I am learning this may no longer be the case. Rather than stick to some arbitrary standard for the sake of tradition I will adjust my scale to bring it in line with community norms. I’m not sure what that means yet, but I will definitely figure it out before I judge my first high school debate this year. I assume I need to raise the scale by at least 1 point across the board but it may require more than that.

**The takeaway is… i won’t try to wreck your speaks, but I’m not a point fairy.**

**__The Role of the Ballot/Purpose of the Activity/Non-Traditional Teams__**

The first thing I want to say isn’t actually a part of my philosophy on judging debates as much as it is an observation about debates I have watched and judged. I can’t count the number of rounds I have watched where a debater says something akin to, “Debate is fundamentally X,” or “the role of the ballot is X.” This is not a criticism. These debaters are astute and clearly understand that definition the nature and purpose of the activity is an extremely useful (often essential) tool for winning debates. **That said, in truth,** **debate is both everything and nothing and the role of the ballot is multiple**. //Asserting// the "purpose of debate" or "the role of the ballot" is essentially a meaningless utterance in my opinion.//Arguing// in favor "a particular purpose of debate” or “a particular role of the ballot” in a given round requires reasons and support. Policy debate could be conceived as a training ground for concerned citizens to learn how to feel and think about particular policies that could be enacted by their government. Policy debate could also be conceived as a space students to voice their dissatisfaction with the actions or inactions of the governments that claim to represent them through various forms of performance. Excellent debaters understand policy debate is cultural resource filled with potential and possibility. Rather than stubbornly clinging to dogmatic axioms, these debaters take a measured approach that recognizes the affordances and constraints contained within competing visions of "the purpose of debate" or the "role of the ballot” and debate the issue like they would any other.

**The problem is assessing the affordances and constraints of different visions requires a sober assessment of what it is we do here**. Most debaters are content to assert, “the most educational model of debate is X,” or the “most competitive model of debate is Y.” Both of these approaches miss the boat because they willfully ignore other aspects of the activity.**Debates should probably be educational.** What we learn and why is (like everything else) up for debate, but it’s hard to argue we shouldn’t be learning something from the activity. Fairness in a vacuum is a coin-flip and that’s hardly worth our time. On the other hand, probably isn’t a purely educational enterprise. Debate isn’t school. If it were students wouldn’t be so excited about doing debate work that they ignore their school work. **The competitive aspects of the activity are important and can’t be ignored or disregarded lightly.** How fair things have to be and which arguments teams are entitled to make are up for debate, but I think we need to respect some constraints lest we confuse all rhetoric for argument. The phrase “debate is a game/the content is irrelevant” probably won’t get you very far, but that’s because games are silly and unimportant by definition. But there are lots of contests that are very important were fairness is paramount (e.g. elections, academic publishing, trials). Rather than assert the same banal lines from recycled framework blocks, excellent debaters will try to draw analogies between policy debate and other activities that matter and where fairness is non-negotiable. **So the takeaway is … I generally think the topic exists for a reason and the aff has to tie their advocacy to the topic, although I open to arguments to the contrary. I tend to think of things in terms of options and alternatives. So even if topicality is a necessarily flawed system that privileges some voices over others, I tend to ask myself what the alternative to reading topicality would be. Comparison of impacts, alternatives, options, is always preferable to blanket statements like “T = genocidal” or “non-traditional aff’s are impossible to research.”**

**__Burden of Persuasion vs. Burden of Rejoinder__**

One of things that makes policy debate a fairly unique activity from a policy/legal perspective is our emphasis on the burden of rejoinder. If one competitor says something then the opponent needs to answer it, otherwise the judge treats the argument as gospel. Debaters might think their judges are as attentive to the flow as they would like, but ask any litigator if trial judges care in the least whether the other attorney answered their arguments effectively. Emphasizing the burden of rejoinder is a way of respecting the voice and arguments of the students who their valuable time competing in this activity. But like everything else in debate there are affordances as well as constraints in emphasizing the burden of rejoinder.**Personally, I think our activity has placed so much emphasis on the burden of rejoinder that we have lost almost all emphasis on the burden of persuasion**. I can’t count the number of rounds I have participated in (as a debater and as a judge) where the vast majority of the claims made in the debate were absolutely implausible. The average politics disad is so contrived that its laughable. Teams string together dozens of improbable internal link chains and treat them as if they were a cohesive whole. Truth be told, the probability of the average “big stick” disad is less than 1% and that’s just real talk. This practice is so ubiquitous because we place such a heavy emphasis on the burden of rejoinder. Fast teams read a disad that was never very probably to begin with and because the 2AC is not fast enough to poke holes in every layer of the disad the judge treats those internal links as conceded (and thus 100% probable). Somehow, through no work of their own the neg’s disad went from being a steaming pile of non-sense to a more or less perfectly reasonable description of reality. This makes NEGATIVE SENSE TO ME. More than anything else, I feel like this phenomenon is contributing to the down fall of our activity. But it is so ingrained in the training of most debates and coaches (more so the coaches than the debaters actually) that it’s sustained by inertia.

**The takeaway is… that when i judge, I try (imperfectly to be sure) to balance my expectations that students meet both the burden of rejoinder and the burden of persuasion. Does this require judge intervention? Perhaps, to some degree, but what it means to “allow ones self to be persuaded?” To be clear, I do not think it is my job to be the sole arbiter of whether a claim was true or false, probable or unlikely, significant or insignificant. I do think about these things constantly though and i think it is both impossible and undesirable for me to ignore those thoughts in the moment of decision. It would behoove anyone I judge to take this into account and //actively argue in favor of a particular balance// between the burdens or rejoinder and persuasion in a particular round.**

**__Importance of Evidence/Cards__**

I once heard a judge tell another competitor, “a card //no matter how bad// will always beat an analytic //no matter how good//.” For the sake of civility I will refrain from using Aron Kall this person’s name, but I could not disagree more with this statement. Arguments are claims backed by reasons with support. The nature of the appropriate support will depend on the nature of the reason and on the nature of the claim. **To the extent that cards are valuable as forms of support in debate it’s because their lend the authority and credibility of an expert to an argument. But there are some arguments were technical expertise is irrelevant.** One example might be the field of morality and ethics. If a debater makes a claim about the morality of assisted suicide backed by sound reasoning there is no a priori reason to prefer a card from an ethicist who argues the contrary. People reason in many different ways and arguments that might seem formally or technically valid might be perfectly reasonable in other settings. I generally prefer debates with a good amount of cards because they tend to correlate with research and that is something I think is valuable in and of itself. But all too often teams uses cards as a crutch to supplement the lack of sound reasoning.

**The takeaway is … If you need to choose between fully explaining yourself and reading a card always choose the former.**

**__Kritiks__**

**The takeaway is … I would say I am more friendly to critical arguments than some judges, but that also means I require a higher level of explanation and depth for those arguments. For instance, it is not sufficient to argue that the aff’s reps/epistemology/ontology/whatever is bad and these questions come first. You have to tell me in what way the aff’s methodology is flawed and how exactly would this result in flawed thinking/policy/ect. Unlike disads, individual links to kritiks have to have impacts to be meaningful. In general, I think people read too many cards when running kritiks at the expense of doing a lot textual and comparative work.**

 **__Theory__**

**I have a relatively high threshold for theory arguments, but I am not one of those judges that thinks the neg teams gets to do whatever they want.** You can win theory debates with me in the back, but it probably isn’t your best shot. As a general rule (though not universal) I think that if you didn’t have to do research for an argument, you don’t learn anything by running it.

**I have VERY high threshold for negative theory arguments that are not called topicality.** It doesn’t mean I wont vote on these arguments if the aff teams makes huge errors, but a person going for one of these argument would look so silly that it would be hard to give them anything about a 27.

=__** Archived Philosophy: **__= General Philosophy

Topicality/Framework Issues

I generally think the topic exists for a reason and the aff has to tie their advocacy to the topic, although I open to arguments to the contrary. I tend to think of things in terms of options and alternatives. So even if topicality is a necessarily flawed system that privileges some voices over others, I tend to ask myself what the alternative to reading topicality would be. Comparison of impacts, alternatives, options, is always preferable to blanket statements like “T = genocidal” or “non-traditional aff’s are impossible to research.”

Kritiks

That said, I would say I am more friendly to critical arguments than some judges, but that also means I require a higher level of explanation and depth for those arguments. For instance, it is not sufficient to argue that the aff’s reps/epistemology/ontology/whatever is bad and these questions come first. You have to tell me in what way the aff’s methodology is flawed and how exactly would this result in flawed thinking/policy/ect. Unlike disads, individual links to kritiks have to have impacts to be meaningful. In general, I think people read too many cards when running kritiks at the expense of doing a lot textual and comparative work.

Theory

I have a relatively high threshold for theory arguments, but I am not one of those judges that thinks the neg teams gets to do whatever they want. You can win theory debates with me in the back, but it probably isn’t your best shot. In general, I think that if you didn’t have to do research for an argument, you don’t learn anything by running it.

I have VERY high threshold for negative theory arguments that are not called topicality. It doesn’t mean I wont vote on these arguments if the aff teams makes huge errors, but a person going for one of these argument would look so silly that it would be hard to give them anything about a 27.

Other things...

I find that in too many debates people read a lot of disads with a lot of impacts thinking the quantity of arguments will win them debate. I think your time would be better spent reading a few less impacts and giving a more deep and warranted (maybe even evidenced) comparison of your impacts to the ones you think the other team is winning. That’s not to say that I hate judging big debates, they just tend to be messier and careful comparison of arguments is sacrificed for coverage. Quality beats quantity any day of the week.