In Defense of Structured Judge Discretion (Martin Sigalow)

Introduction

Lincoln Douglas debate judging is like trying to take an important standardized test while five elephants repeatedly, deliberately, and loudly smash expensive china against the class board.1Judging Lincoln Douglas debate for years is like if that test kept adding new questions and the elephants discover iPads.

For debaters (and judges), judges choosing things is scary. Still, letting them do so sometimes may solve some important debate defects.

I will first present a model for debate adjudication which reveals the crucial lack of a certain kind of debate tool, the judge-applied rule, that has useful applications, especially, for beating certain ugly arguments. This tool offers strategic value and to judges for its sense and relevance. At the end I will provide a template to answer some objections.

To summarize at the outset: arguments gain relevance in debate by claiming that some rule for debate, like some role of the ballot argument or evidentiary standard, is important and applies to this specific debate. Most of the time debaters are required to justify every step of this process, including the application of the debate rule to this specific situation. Sometimes, however, the application of a rule is obvious to everyone involved but not amenable to in-round proof, e.g. whether a theory argument is frivolous. In certain situations, then, it might be better to force a debater to argue that the judge ought to apply the rule themselves than to force a debater to argue in favor of a certain application. I think there should be arguments to that effect. I call these kinds of arguments “judge-applied rules,” (“JARs”) and the aim of this piece is to make sense of, and then justify, the expansion of that pre-existing practice in order to weaken some of the community’s most exploitative and toxic arguments.

Here is an example of a JAR:

• The judge should vote affirmative if the negative’s theory argument is frivolous.
• That’s because frivolous theory empirically destroys affirmative win percentage and minimizes education about the topic’s central questions in favor of procedural prior questions.
• If the judge believes at the end of the debate that the negative’s theory argument is frivolous, they ought to vote affirmative, regardless of in-debate arguments for or against the argument’s frivolousness.
• In-round debates about frivolous theory are inappropriate because it’s easy in each debate round to win that your theory shell is not frivolous, but then you can go into subsequent debates with totally different rules and avoid their substantive questions too; it is hard to “prove” in a debate that a theory argument is frivolous, which is a horrible result when everyone in the community already knows which theory arguments are frivolous.2A more complete version of this problem is discussed later.

I also provide the analysis below to help debaters to understand exactly how their activity works in order to more readily exploit its structures, and perhaps to create space for more interesting articles on the nature of debate and creative things to do inside it that solve problems.

Debate is a game of rules and applications for judge adjudication

Argumentative appeals to a judge’s ballot always involve justifying a rule for adjudication and then arguing for the application of that rule in a particular case. Let’s first understand how debate rules work and then speak to their application.

Rules3I mean to use this word in quite a broad sense, as you will see. I certainly don’t mean only rules hinted at in theory arguments or imposed by tournaments.range in their impact on a debate from intense to definitive and even to minor. A rule with an intense impact, such as a Standard, might make a very strong claim that, when applying claims about the truth of the resolution or its moral desirability, the judge (only) ought to consider claims from a specific ethical theory. There are also definitive rules that govern a subset of any given debate, although perhaps an important subset. Typically these sorts of rules concern the jurisdiction of the judge, such as “evidence about out of round practices is inadmissible” or “judges do not have the jurisdiction to vote on non-topical affirmatives because ballots say only topical debaters can win.”4It does not. Never lose to this argument.Many rules are relatively minor: “don’t consider an old date as a detriment to a philosophical argument.” In each of these cases, a debater argues in favor of the existence of a rule and then argues that it should govern something the judge does in this space, often by a pointed reference to a specific argument or practice. The clearest example of this kind of reasoning at work is Theory. A debater making a theory argument argues in favor of a specific rule that the judge ought to adopt. In the violation, that debater also argues that this should apply in this debate.

We have a term for a massive debate rule that is supposed to decide a debate all on its own: a “role of the ballot.”5A “role of the judge” is, of course, the same thing as a role of the ballot. I have heard various cosmetic differences asserted, all related to the words used to classify these arguments, and almost never concerning their substantive qualities. Anyone who strongly believes in an internal separation of the two should substitute “role(s) of the judge and ballot” for every reference to role of the ballot.Some roles of the ballot purport to be all-inclusive rules that dominate other roles of the ballot, e.g. the most extreme example of truth testing, sometimes argued for. Some roles of the ballot are conditional (i.e. they only apply in some cases) and only work by supervening on top of other roles of the ballot. Theory works this way: the voters of fairness and education are traditionally argued to exist and compel specific decisions in the case that they apply, and to otherwise have no impact on who wins a debate. Additionally, many rules against in-round discursive violence, such as blatant racism, come into play only where there is a violation (rather than in every round). These rules, it should strike you, are often employed by judges without the need to formally argue for them.

It is common, of course, that a specific rule is taken as a given before the debate and merely appealed to. This does nothing to hamper the adjudication process, although obvious problems will arise if one of the two debaters don’t know that this rule lacks the requirement of justification. These rules escape the need for justification because they are rules already held to be important by the judge, or, at least, held to be important by both debaters such that the judge often feels the need to adopt the rule.6Some of these latter situations occur because of unfortunate debating on the part of both students.A big class of examples of this is a judge’s “defaults.” Certain ideas, such as whether a debater need prove their debate rule acceptable or their instance of the debate rule acceptable (competing interpretations/reasonability) or how the judge ought to figure out offense if no role of the ballot is presented (e.g. a judge saying that they will “default” to comparative worlds if no one argues for one role of the ballot or other) are held regardless of argumentation, even if they are commonly discarded at the first gesture of an argument in their area.

I believe I can say without exaggeration that every debate round has many rules that neither debater feels the need to justify, or that the judge does not feel requires justification. The classic example of this is the rule that new arguments or evidence are inadmissible. In Lincoln Douglas debate, judges do not hold a debater to explain, and therefore to have to win, why new arguments are prohibited. Instead, judges take the fact that new arguments are inadmissible as a given. It is then the job of any debater to argue that a specific argument or piece of evidence is genuinely new; they may be wrong about this, of course (e.g. a piece of 2N evidence is potentially admissible as a response to a piece of 1AR evidence). Judges typically hold, as well, that cross-examination is binding without the requirement for justification.

Over time, the number of rules judges have accepted without the requirement of formal argument has grown. A movement crystalized in my senior year of high school to no longer require formal argument for the absolute relevance of fairness to a debate. Over time things have also evolved such that many judges no longer require debaters to prove that oppression is morally problematic. There is nothing wrong, of course, with a judge enforcing a rule they believe to be true, provided that the parties to the debate are notified in advance. In many7Ideally, all.cases the rules a judge will enforce without requiring argument are listed on a judge’s paradigm, directly or indirectly.

Judge discretion

While debaters accept that judges will hold rules without requiring argument, debaters often prefer rules be argued for because it gives them greater control over the direction of the debate. After all, debaters have little choice but to accept these rules other than through judge preferencing. Judge preferencing, though, helps to make this system efficient by allowing debaters who would prefer to mutually8A stretch of the term, of course, given the lack of qualified Lincoln Douglas Debate judges.accept a given rule debate each other under these conditions.

“Judge intervention” is often incorrectly used as a catch-all term to include any decision a judge makes that one believes is incorrect. The term is not typically used, and rightly so, in reference to clerical errors, aural processing errors, or simple misunderstandings on the part of the judge.9Sometimes the statement by a judge that they do not understand something is a front for a personally motivated decision. In most cases, however, a lack of understanding on the part of the judge is a communication error on the part of one or both debaters. A genuine misunderstanding, whether caused by a communication failure or just incompetence, is not judge intervention.It is, I believe, used correctly to indicate one of these situations: 1) a judge knows what the arguments in favor of/against a rule (or its application) are as presented in the debate but decides to ignore those arguments, 2) a judge holds a preference or rule but did not effectively publicize that rule,10This is problematic where the judge decides, at the moment the debate is occurring, to invent and hold themselves to a rule. It is substantially more problematic when the fact that the judge holds a rule is only known to a subgroup of the Lincoln Douglas debate community, who then enjoy a competitive advantage commensurate with the importance of the rule to any debate they see.3) a judge, for one of a number of reasons, makes debate “moves” debaters did not make, frequently by applying a rule to a situation a debater did not apply it to (e.g. embedded clash, Lincoln Douglas debate’s most necessary sin). Theoretically, as long as judges avoid doing one of these things, they can judge responsibly even while holding a great number of non-arguable rules.

Judge intervention is commonly considered to be one of the worst things a judge can do. A debate, after all, is a contest between two participants. The decider of the contest is supposed to be a neutral observer who discharges their (preferably minimal) guiding preferences in accordance with what happened and decides on the correct winner. Although both debaters often disagree about who the contest winner was, both almost always agree that the judge is supposed to be judging the contest as it occurred, and not how the judge would have liked it to have occurred. The contest operated under certain rule parameters, taken from publicized judge paradigms and common practice. A debater succeeds if they debated better under these conditions. A judge venturing outside of those shared conditions and happenings for personal reasons is seen, quite accurately in most cases, as taking away the point of the whole business.

Despite this, as most judges will admit at their most honest, judges do have discretion in how they decide debates. The practical evidence for this is when, as happens quite frequently, judges with similar predispositions come to different decisions in the same debate. On a structural level, judge discretion in Lincoln Douglas debate often occurs when there is a defect in the rules or their application.11While most of the rules/application errors I will discuss are debater-caused, it is entirely possible that a judge holds a rule or application predisposition that is unclear enough to make discretion inevitable. It may be that these judges ought to change those preferences. It may well be, as we will see later, that judges ought to keep them for deterrence purposes, as they often do.Debaters frequently introduce legitimately vague rules (judges ought to reject12Or “penalize,” or however you’d like to frame the rule. “frivolous theory”13One of the greater motivations of this article, as I have said, is to give some teeth to this currently toothless aspersion.) and incomplete applications of their rules (e.g. a debater saying that “old evidence is bad” in response to a piece of evidence from 2014, or as a general heading to a case containing many pieces of evidence which vary in recency). Other times, judge discretion is exercised when a judge is forced to move from a quantitative/binary determination (an argument is present/absent) to a qualitative one (an argument is good/bad). Some areas of debate are inherently qualitative, such as risk assessment. In that case, an alternative cause or solvency objection to an advantage typically is not taken to have “reduced the risk of the argument to zero.” The move to channel reasoning qualities into a quantitative explanation of likelihood inevitably invites some degree of judge choice and personal psychology that governs how “strong” they take various factors to be, even though that discretion is often enforced by those judges along lines consistent with norms, communal or self-precedential.14I believe that, in many cases, the judges who do not think they are applying these norms discretionarily are misleading themselves.

In Lincoln Douglas debate, judge discretion exists as a looming presence in the fog of debate war, ready to pounce when a debater does not make themselves clear. Getting better at debate can involve many things but a great many of them involve finding ways to control discretion. At the beginning of a career, debater’s often work on making their arguments connected and clear enough that judges do not frequently find bubbles of discretion packed in their argumentative geology that make the debate more about the judge than about the contest. At more advanced stages, debaters use discretion to their advantage by employing persuasion, rhetorically useful arguments, and palatable rules to take what discretion exists and channel it into a victory. This is quite tough and, once one is competent at debate’s other essentials, the single most useful tool in a debater’s arsenal.

The rest of this piece will, in effect, argue for the creation of a tool for debaters to expand judge discretion in strategic ways. I believe this will help improve the average quality of debate by avoiding “argument room” traps that currently plague debate.

Explaining and justifying judge-applied rules

My overall argument is that debaters should sometimes argue for rules and then argue that judges, and not debaters, should apply those rules. The judge-applied rule (JAR) has the following form:

• A rule statement
• A rule justification
• A statement that the judge is to apply the rule
• A justification for why the judge ought to apply the rule

Here is another example to supplement the one from the beginning of the article:

• The judge ought to vote affirmative if the negative has made this debate round unsafe.
• That’s because the ability to debate in the first place, and thus for the judge to adjudicate a debate that has occurred, is contingent upon safety as a precondition for expression that only your ballot can correct.
• If the judge believes at the end of the debate that the negative has made this debate unsafe, they ought to vote aff, regardless of in round argumentation.
• In-round argument over safe space issues only compounds pressures on disadvantaged debaters to explain their struggles, which makes debate even less safe.15Another cosmetic change that may seem attractive to some is for a debater to argue for a rule that contains within it a stipulation that the rule is applied by the judge (e.g. “vote affirmative if the judge thinks that the negative has made debate unsafe”). There is nothing wrong with this as long as it is understood that this “rule” is actually a statement of rule and a statement of application (a translation of the previous rule might be: “Vote affirmative if the negative made debate unsafe. The judge should apply this rule because…”).

Note the absence of any formal attempt to “prove” that the negative has made debate unsafe.

The default assumption for all debate issues is that they are the subject of argument. When some issue is raised, that issue must be supported. The default assumption is that an issue is unsupported unless otherwise argued for. Therefore, there ought to be, and is, a strong presumption that rules be debater applied. The reason for this is very clear: barring strong reason to do so, introducing a JAR into a debate strengthens the de facto discretion of the judge, which, by definition, takes the debate out of the control of the debaters. Unfairness, as is often hastily intoned, occurs most egregiously when things outside of the particular content of a debate comes to determine its result, because nothing a debater did merited or demerited16This is apparently a word.that result. This is, of course, compelling in the vast majority of cases.

It is strange, therefore, to argue that some issue not be subject to argument. As I hope the analysis above makes clear, however, judges already apply certain rules without the intervention of a debater. Sometimes debater arguments about these apply but sometimes they do not. Two of the previous examples make this clear: new arguments and racism. If the first time an argument occurs is the 2AR, judges must apply the new-ness rule themselves. Judges also frequently use their own judgement about whether an argument is new when debates about newness turn to squabbling. As for racist in-round conduct, judges often use their own metrics (and, probably, rightly so) to determine whether in-debate conduct is offensive. Most of these are rules the judge themselves previously adopted.

The proposal here, then, is to expand judge application to a limited number of rules argued for in debates. In effect, this style of argument, which I believe Lincoln Douglas debate sorely needs in some areas, opens up judge discretion in a limited and important way. This way is limited because judges can only right apply a rule themselves if they are explicitly permitted to by the winning of an in-debate argument. This way is important because certain problems in debate are poorly suited for redress within Lincoln Douglas debate’s unique environment. JARs shift the locus of the debate away from the issues that people have been losing arguments on for a decade. Instead of having to argue that a theory argument is not frivolous, or that something was bullying, or that something was racist, a debater now only has to prove that the judge should be in a position to decide those things. In many ways, proportionate to your own argument quality, this is substantially easier to win.

Before I go through the constraints created by that environment, I will make one argument in favor of the permissibility of JARs that is instrumentalist and pessimistic.17With the hope that those who fail to see the larger issues I present as problematic, and who detest judge discretion in all of its forms, will nevertheless see the value in JARs.I will argue below that judge discretion has its place. It is important to note, however, that judge discretion is inevitable. I do not simply mean that in a strictly philosophical way (i.e. not all judge decisions are discretionary, although many are) or in a weakened debate way (i.e. that it will happen sometimes). I do mean that many more decisions are subject to discretion than debaters think and certainly more than judges think. Many, if not most, judges are looking for excuses to exercise discretion in some area.18Certainly, judges ought to be better. But fiat only goes so far.Judges are people. People have wants and needs. People19Including judges.are delusional to think that judges can fully repress that part of themselves and be a dutiful calculator of value. To allow judge discretion to be structured allows discretion to ooze out in meaningful and justified ways, rather than the usual stuff. Judge intervention occurs for many reasons but it is clear that it occurs in great part due to judges wanting to decide a debate in a certain way and looking for any excuse to do so (i.e. the worst-case scenario, if you are a debater). It may also occur because a judge is simply angry or bored at having to mechanically decide every debate.20Many people dislike doing that, apparently.JARs can give judges a way to let their internal compasses work the way it normally would, constrained, flexibly and crucially, by specific direction from the debaters themselves. I do believe, therefore, that even people who unambiguously despise the very idea of judge discretion can get behind JARs.

Now to the heart of the matter: judge-applied rules should exist because the structure of Lincoln Douglas debate rounds makes some necessary arguments unwinnable. Debate is, and mostly ought to be, a closed space where each argument is presented in each debate as if it was never heard before. Knowledge from outside the space of the debate is not supposed to influence the space of the inside of that space. The reason for this is simple: if the outside world counted, the judge not only has to judge the debate as it occurred but also a confluence of outside factors they may, or may not, have privileged knowledge of. A limited semiotic space also aims to create a sanitized bubble deprived of past history and external considerations.21Which is important for the state of the debate for reasons I won’t discuss.

This system has certain defects in Lincoln Douglas debate, however. In my mind the most pernicious defect of this system is that judges cannot call on their prior experience, in the closed bubble of the debate, to question opportunistic debate arguments. I have in mind here most singularly frivolous theory. It is almost impossible to criticize, in the sterilized, fully argument-focused world, frivolous theory arguments on the grounds that they are frivolous. It is always easy for a debater to say “my only belief, in the context of this debate, is that the rule I have put forward is accurate. I will win, in the context of the debate, that this rule is appropriate.” It is also easy for debaters to say this in most, if not all, of their debates for different rules. Often these theory arguments have little to do with the opposing case (“spec,” or other bidirectional theory arguments, being classic examples) and their merits will determine the debate’s outcome. It is always possible, within the range of normal argument, to defeat a theory objection by saying that their frivolous argument, in particular, removes fairness-barriers to debate the substance of people’s positions. That aside, the argument goes, I would have debated your position on its merits.

The key thing about all of these arguments is that everyone in the room knows they are incorrect, and also lies. That they are lies is known to the judge, to the theory deployer, to the other debater, and to every spectator. People have been trying for years to purge debate of frivolous theory. “I do not like, but will nevertheless vote on, frivolous theory” is, after all, almost a canon rule of the first-year out paradigm. The difficult thing is that judges are not permitted to decide for themselves whether an (often obviously) theory argument is frivolous. A theory argument is frivolous if it did not need to be introduced, or was done so for the purpose of skirting a debate issue on another level. The content of the theory argument itself can be used as evidence that theory argument is not frivolous, in ways that people only know is false from the past practice of these kinds of arguments and years in the community. The structure of the theory argument also requires quite a bit of extra work to answer from any other kind of argument due to formalized community-imposed accounts of how theory ought to be answered. Attempts to defeat these kinds of theory arguments, despite spirited attempts from debaters and coaches across time, have been quite unsuccessful. Debates on these issues become almost purely technical contests devoid of external educational merit and any semblance of issue-focus.

My proposal here attempts to provide the best kind of answer to frivolous theory. It is easy to prove that frivolous theory is bad and quite another to prove, inside a debate round that a certain kind of theory argument in fact is frivolous. My proposal is a remedy to that situation because, if argued for correctly, it shows that the judge ought not require a debater to prove that a theory argument is frivolous. By sidestepping that annoying step (for great reasons, I think), these theory arguments become easier to answer. As a practical matter, I hope at least that this piece can help debaters who routinely have to defeat frivolous theory positions. By empowering the judge to decide how to employ a rule that bars.

The second external reason to adopt judge-applied rules as a model for debate is related to the above issue and concerns the debate community. Many theory arguments (and some Kritikal arguments) aim, implicitly or explicitly, to create a better community. These arguments almost never succeed in doing that, however, because, unlike in Policy debate where judge discretion is tolerated to a much greater extent than it is in Lincoln Douglas debate,22I am not advocating for Policy debate’s model for community enforcement.judges in Lincoln Douglas debate rarely think of themselves as having the power to enforce communal norms themselves. A community norm in Lincoln Douglas debate is only as good as the debater arguing for it in the debate. As such, any and all communal norms in Lincoln Douglas debate hardly exist, and are never enforced as such. Communal views on issues become purely incidental, therefore, to the activity in the way it is practices.

That, in particular, is how you get frivolous theory, a practice that almost everyone agrees is bad, to rampage for over half of a decade. Lincoln Douglas debate rounds make a poor place to enforce community norms for at least two reasons. First incredible time and speech constraints force debates to undeveloped and late-breaking technical contests that require constant religitation. Second, Lincoln Douglas judges are unwilling to pretend like they or the rest of the community believes anything until after the debate concludes; as such, the community ceases, for the duration of all of the debates that are its object, to exist. Allowing debaters to win that a communal norm is good, and empower the judge (a community representative/outside observer) to enforce those norms can give some semblance of community voice in substantive debates. I think this would massively improve debate’s ability to regulate bad or pernicious arguments while still allowing communal rules-violators to argue their case.

A note on strategy: this kind of argument is worth the time investment for several reasons. First and most importantly, often the strongest objection to one of the arguments outlined above is its shady character, rather than any one particular objection to it, not least because usually these sorts of claims, like theory, are time consuming and structurally intensive to answer normally. Second, these arguments truly do “come before” anything they critique Rules for judge application, by their very nature, supersede even the claims on the “highest layer” because those claims all make indirect judge appeals. This claim is a direct judge rule and ought to govern the applicability of anything that can happen in a debate (until an issue, offense or defense, is governed to matter by a judge, it does not). A JAR’s impact on a debate is as big as the arguments it affects, and the remedies (like dropping a debater) that a judge recommends.

A template for answering some objections

“The application of rules by judges is arbitrary.” First and foremost, everything I’ve previously discussed should indicate that, if JARs allow arbitrariness, it is at least the good kind of arbitrariness. JARs are also not irredeemably arbitrary. First, someone’s personal beliefs are not “arbitrary” in the sense that they are random. In fact, people “calling things like they see them” is a far more predictable application than a contorted logical argument to achieve the same result. Second, judges will, after debates, have to explain why they used their discretion in ways they did. That is a natural check on judges making decisions contrary to the prevailing facts of the debate. Third, judges do not decide thoughtlessly and randomly. They are especially less likely to do so if the judgment is legitimately traceable to them and not just the application of a debater-applied fact.

“Debate-rounds should be neutral of outer communal influences or beliefs.” First, it isn’t. Theory norms about what will happen in future debates, disclosure policies, and out-of-round influences over judges all complicate the quest for semiotic neutrality. Second, it shouldn’t be. The lack of any communal enforcement of any of its norms is what allowed the Lincoln Douglas community to degenerate to conflict between pure opportunists and ideologues. Third, it’s dishonest. A judge shouldn’t have to pretend they’ve never seen a spec theory argument before until the debate concludes and then admit to knowing exactly what it is for enforcement purposes. The assumptions governing what everyone knows that everyone else knows should be assumed throughout, not only at the end.

“Some judges don’t feel comfortable making these kinds of determinations.” First and foremost, I strongly believe that they should get comfortable with it to better serve the students they are supposed to be supporting in their role as judges. Helping to disseminate this piece will help accomplish this goal (I hope!). Second, if you don’t think your judge will apply these rules, don’t make these arguments in front of that judge until they’ve changed their mind. Third, the arguments you will have to make in favor of the judge applying the rule will often be a good hook for a judge to feel like they’re deciding “objectively.”

“It is expressly against the paradigm of some judges to use their opinions about these kinds of issues. What if a judge decides that they will refuse to figure out for themselves whether a theory argument is frivolous, even if the consequence of a debate about JARs explicitly requires that they do so?” First, I can’t force judges to do anything. Neither, at the end of the day, can debaters. Debaters ought to read the paradigms of your judges before debates. Judges may always decide to not listen to particular kinds of arguments, JARs included.23I do feel, however, that it is substantially unfair to not notify debaters that you don’t listen to particular kinds of arguments in advance and that, in the absence of explicit paradigm notice, judges should try and suck it up this one time if the debate has gone that way.Broader than that, judges can always decide to reserve their opinions of specific issues. I’m not saying debaters should yell at a judge that their paradigm is wrong! Second, a judge is not truly “tab” if they do not even try to figure out what they personally think about the issue that the JAR forces them to think about. In those situations, a debate has, in fact, been had about the way that the judge should approach a question. A judge that decides to not express their opinion on this matter is, in a strange way, less tab, because they have substituted their own personal preference (“no JARs”) for an issue that has actually been the subject of debate and resolved (“yes JARs”). Third, judges do have preferences that are not truly “tab” and affect the outcome of the debate.24That’s what’s on the rest of their paradigms.As I’ve expressed above, the failure to bring those in line with any actual debate tournament structure is bad for debate. Judges ought to strongly consider letting themselves have opinions when the debaters want them to.25That is, the operative conclusion of a potential contest between the debaters, involving relative time allocation choices, favors the adoption of a JAR.

“Judge applied rules should be debater applied to minimize judge intervention” This is the status quo and will not solve the problems I’ve previous identified. But, of course, if a particular rule is suited to debater application it should be applied as such.

“If debaters can just argue that rules ought to be applied in round, this isn’t valuable.” It may be that this is a better debate to have than the alternative debate you would have had. Debate is contextual and difficult. Don’t use a strategic tool when it wouldn’t be useful.

“I thought judge discretion was bad? You said that before.” This proposal channels judge discretion around particular issues that must be raised by debaters. Judge discretion just is. This proposal allows judges to productively exercise their discretion within limits they can feel comfortable with.

“This seems to disadvantage debaters on the wrong side of how judges feel.” That it does. My point is that debaters should get more in tune with how their judges, and thus the community, feels.

“Some rules take advantage of known judge preferences in bad ways. After all, if my judge believes that Kant is wrong, then a rule for the judge to ‘reject any argument you believe to be incorrect’ deprives me of substantial opportunity to win, especially if I don’t know my judge’s prior beliefs as well as my opponent.” A major advantage of my system is that the rule itself is still arguable. The rule above can be, and should be, criticized on the grounds that it is too vague and opens discretion too much to arbitrary preconceived notions. At any moment, a preposterous rule can be defeated by arguing either that the rule is poor, or that the application of the rule should be governed by in-round argument.

“What if the other debater introduces a rule that the judge should not apply judge-made rules and then lets them apply it? This theory allows for debate contradictions!” This rule contradicts itself; the theory does not. The judge cannot apply this rule without having to abandon it and resort to a previous state where it does not apply. Needless to say, everything I’ve written above about why judge made rules are good (some of which a debater, by the nature of introducing one of these rules in the first place, will already have introduced) is also a reason why this rule is bad to adopt.

“Debaters will just use this in the place of other arguments they ought to have to prove applications for and flood the debate with these kinds of claims.” First, and this may surprise you given everything else in the article, but I believe that you should go for “JARs bad” if they make ten of them (assuming they are the first one to introduce one). Investing significant time and effort into a strategy, as a substitute for formal argument in other areas, is a truly poor idea. Second, they have to justify, for each one, why it would avoid the general problems with judge discretion outlined above. These arguments should be genuinely different, so it’s not really a good time investment.  Third, as I hope I’ve identified, there really aren’t that many JARs that are capable of incredible damage, both because many of the possible warranting situations justify defense rather than offense, and because getting around the judge discretion issue is tough. Lastly, a debater can always introduce a JAR that any JAR they believe to be a mere intentional substitute for application work ought to be rejected.26Please indulge me this minor cheat.Your judge may not believe you. Nevertheless, to actually approach the horizon of the genuine accord of belief between judge and debater is good.