Stancliffe,+James

=Basic Information= I debated for 8 years in Australia, and I’ve been judging for the past three years in Illinois. =What I’ll listen to= I’ll listen and vote on anything that you persuade me to vote on. This is the most important thing for you to take away from my paradigm. I judge the debate you present to me. It is up to you and your opponent to tell me what this debate is about and what it is fought over - I will never require you to make any particular argument. That being said, my philosophy is that you should assume that I have no knowledge of anything you’re talking about, so you can’t assume I’ve heard your moral theory, both because I may not have actually heard of it, and because it’s incredibly unfair to your opponent if they haven’t. Also, I’ll vote on empirically wrong, logically inconsistent or offensive arguments, but your speaks will suffer. I also have a very low threshold for responses to these sorts of arguments – if you’re attacking your opponent in an offensive and personal way, they basically need to point it out and say that I should vote for them because of it, and I’m sold. The only time I may intervene is with extremely abusive theory. My general paradigm is that if you can make a logical argument as to why theory should be used, and I can understand it, I’ll go with it, even if it is abusive, although I’ll have a low threshold for responses to this. However, if your theory is so abusive that I can’t understand why you are using it, I will disregard it. Speed – I debated Parliamentary in Australia, so my speed is definitely not as fast as other judges. Assume for the sake of the debate that you need to go at about 80% of your max pace. This is for your benefit. I’ll give you two or three ‘clear’ shouts before I just give up – at that stage, if I miss an argument you make, it didn’t happen, and I won’t call it after the round unless I got most of it and it was my fault I didn’t flow it. Speaks – If you are mean, illogical or crazy, you will get lower speaks. If you make it easy for me to vote, have structure and logic, no matter whether I’m voting on a contention all the way through a theory level, you’ll be happy. Above all, be clear.