Klinger,+Michael

Glenbrook North, Harvard
BACKGROUND: I debated for four years in college at Harvard and four years in high school at Glenbrook North. This is my first year judging college debate, but I have extensive experience judging high school. If you know anything about how I debated you should not necessarily assume that I feel the same way as a judge. In general I will try to be fair and assess your arguments as you have debated them. What few biases I do carry I have listed below:

TOPICALITY - Topicality is a voting issue and never a reverse voting issue. I think the debate about reasonability versus competing interpretations is often a waste of time. Obviously topicality is a question of competing interpretations, but it seems just as intuitive to me that if the aff wins their interpretation solves the impact to topicality i.e. fairness or education, then there’s no compelling reason to vote negative.

KRITIKS – I have little bias with regards to these arguments. The K was not really my forte when I debated; but as a judge in high school debates I have voted for kritiks with alarming regularity. I find this is usually because the aff fails to stay aggressive against the alternative and the impact. Similarly, I find that negative teams lose to critical affirmatives when they fail to explain how their arguments (framework or otherwise) interact with the claims in the 1ac. I will not do a lot of work for either side in reconstructing the meaning of arguments that are not coherent to me in the debate.

THEORY – I am a tough sell on aff theory arguments. If your aff strategy relies on winning PICS or conditionality bad then I’m probably not the judge for you. Consult counterplans are not just theoretically legitimate, but an aff burden of proof. I will not vote on a theory argument that takes less than ten seconds for you to read. The only caveat to my negative theory bias is that I think alternatives (or counterplans) that 'fiat' a number of private actors are clearly unfair to the affirmative. I also tend to think that the affirmative should be able to weigh the consequences of their plan against any kritik.

DISADS/COUNTERPLANS – I am most experienced with these sorts of debates and I enjoy judging them. I guess I am more of the link first school of thought regarding disadvantage risk, in that I find uniqueness debates to usually be redundant with the link. That probably needs more explanation… I find that if a disad is extremely unique then it obviously requires a high magnitude of a link to trigger the impact. By the same token, if a disad is brink-ish then the neg has to win a high magnitude of a link to distinguish the plan from the conditions that created a brink. Either way, the essential question is the degree to which the aff causes the link. This doesn’t mean that uniqueness is irrelevant, but I find it often to be less important than the link.

OTHER – I’ll read evidence if I think it’s necessary. That being said, I will always give preference to the side that does a better job debating their evidence. I keep a pretty good flow, but I won’t vote on an argument as “dropped” if it is intuitively answered by another argument in a speech. You can get good speaker points by being sweet in the CX or funny in your speech. It’s pretty hard to offend me and I’m not really the type to dock speaker points for being mean. By the same token, if your strategy is to try to pull heartstrings to win my ballot I suggest you go looking someplace else. Bribe attempts for less than three figures are not worth your time. Cross-reading will result in a loss and zero speaker points. Trust me, I can tell.