Complaints about Topic Wording, JF18 Edition (Bob Overing)

After 10 years of debating and coaching in LD and policy, writing for the Premier Debate briefs, teaching at camps, etc., I feel like I’m a pretty decent researcher. I’ve written some pretty weird affs over the years and have coached students who also enjoy exploring hyper narrow segments of the topic and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. As somewhat of a gag, I used to have students challenge me to find a viable plan on any past LD topic, many of which do not readily admit policy debate.

But even for a pretty able researcher who enjoys having a million tabs open and combing through law review articles, this topic is incredibly frustrating.

I just spent the better part of four hours trying to find a solvency advocate for a specific plan I want my students to read at TOC. Several teams have run this plan. None has a true solvency advocate. I asked several of my debaters and co-coaches to look; they couldn’t find anything. I ran dozens of searches with every permutation of the terms in the resolution and their synonyms. I used every search function I know, including AND, quotes, the minus sign, asterisks, and AROUND(X). I made it to the nth page of Google and several databases before finally giving up. It just doesn’t exist.

Many authors say this subset of plea bargaining is bad, but none say we should abolish it. Despite the plethora of inherency and advantage authors, maybe we shouldn’t brute force the literature to defend a plan that simply put, no one defends.

Then I started thinking back to my early research on the topic and just how difficult it was to find any solvency advocates, let alone one for a specific plan. If you search abolish plea bargaining on Google Scholar, on the first page you get 10 results, and of those 10, only 2 advocate the abolition of plea bargaining. Neither is from this century. In fact, the average age of the first 10 publications on the abolition of plea bargaining is 29.2, i.e., from the late 1980s. The average age of the next ten results is 34.7. I understand the algorithm might prioritize more heavily-cited works which tend to be older, but it’s not encouraging that none of the first twenty hits were from the past decade. When you search by date, Google Scholar will return publications from the past year: abolish plea bargaining returned zero. If I were crafting the LD topics, this would be a bad sign.

To be sure, there is no paucity of literature arguing that plea bargains are bad, that they’re harmful, coercive, immoral, etc. But that’s different than saying we should abolish them. If 99% of the authors on the topic are solvency advocates for the reform counterplan, then you don’t really have topic literature for a plea bargain abolition topic. You have literature for a topic about reform. The qualified immunity topic from ND16 was much better: “The United States ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers.” Limit is a verb we can work with. Limit more readily allows plans, and it fits with the topic literature, much of which defends reforming qualified immunity doctrine, but not abandoning it altogether. Limit “qualified immunity” returns twenty results on average ten years newer than abolish plea bargaining. Future resolutions should be worded more like ND16.

There’s also strangeness about choosing a passive voice wording in this context, where affs can defend executive, legislative, or judicial action at the federal or state level, or perhaps even private actors like the ABA, or perhaps no actor at all (e.g. “I fiat a world where plea bargains are gone”). I suspect the topic committee sees a special LD-ness to the passive voice wording, whereas “The United States federal government ought to substantially limit plea bargaining in the criminal justice system” sounds like a policy resolution. The interest in using topic wording to prime moral and political philosophy debates (as opposed to policy debates) is understandable, but the current path of vague, quasi-policy wording hurts both sides. It invites specification theory, topicality, and other procedurals at the expense of substantive debate. This was true on Day 1 of the topic even before teams got more creative; by my count, at least 25% of debaters in Blake/CPS elims read topic-related procedurals against fairly vanilla, topical affirmatives. And this doesn’t just apply to national circuit styles – a lot of commonsense solvency arguments are contingent on actor/mechanism, and implementation debates can and do occur at regional and local levels.

The NSDA LD Topic Wording Committee can easily fix these issues and has toyed with doing so in the past (e.g. by including concretely-worded topics in their final set of a couple dozen, but never in the final ten selected). Absent a better topic selection process, we must continue to push for better wording in our topic submissions here.

Anyway, all of this leaves circuit LD in a quandary. Do we debate for months using the same half dozen or so solvency advocates for a whole resolution approach, or do we adopt more lenient standards for aff solvency advocates? It’s been a bit of both, but I think we’ve seen more of the latter. Elite teams are reading (1) plans with solvency advocates who don’t use the word abolish nor ban, (2) affs that say plea bargaining is bad but do not take a stance on any specific implementation, and (3) affs without solvency advocates at all. Given the lack of good literature supporting abolition specifically, and the lack of authors who defend a specific plan for implementing such a ban, this makes some sense. It’s just unfortunate because it means empirical solvency debates are much shallower, agent-based disads are prepared in the dark until CX can clarify the link (undermining the benefits of disclosure), and common solvency questions about circumvention and enforcement are hopelessly vague.

It’s worth noting too that relaxing the standards for solvency advocates can disadvantage the aff if the neg gets the same allowances. Throughout the topic, we’ve seen a slew of cheaty counterplans that abolish plea bargaining but for one set, often Trump-related Mueller investigation plea bargains, but also for cases involving cartels, sexual assault, terrorism, etc. As I noted in January, these PICs add nothing to the debate; they only subtract. If recent solvency advocates for abolishing plea bargaining are hard to find, imagine finding one for abolishing all plea bargains except those pertaining to Trump. Solvency advocates for these PICs simply don’t exist, but neither do true solvency advocates for some common plans. Is there a way to navigate the Scylla of generic whole resolution affirmatives and the Charybdis of artificial plan-inclusive counterplans? If so, I haven’t found it, but perhaps a brave sailor at TOC will prove me wrong.