If we believe that there ought to be rules for LD—and we do—we need to look at how those rules affect the people involved in the activity. That is, to whom are these rules important? This is an easy question to answer. The rules are important to 1) the debaters and 2) the judges. Occasionally the tournament staff is consulted on issues where there is a perceived rules violation, but this is rare, and need not concern us here, since if we have clear rules, the tournament staff would be merely interpreting and/or enforcing, and not legislating. The legislation, as we have claimed, has already taken place. (One could argue, perhaps, that the classical Lockean requirements for legislation were somehow not met when the NFL created the rules, but this would presume that not only is the forensics community a democracy, but that it is able to perform democratic functions, both of which are quite a leap. And, to be honest, I’m tired of defending the right of the NFL to create rules of forensics. In other words, get over it!)
So the rules apply to rounds and, mostly, within rounds. The rules, as we have argued, exist, and are clearly written and available to all NFL members (or anyone else, for that matter) in the district manual. And I have extracted them into a pdf on this site, for those who are incapable of surfing the NFL site (a large group with whom I have great sympathy). Which means that everyone walking into every round, debater or judge, has the easy ability to bring along a copy of these rules. They only take up a couple of printed pages. And they can answer, or prevent, all sorts of issues that might otherwise detract or distract from the round. The is, for instance, the Myth of Negative Presumption, which has about as many believers in LD circles as there are believers in UFOs, the Yeti and WMDs in Iraq combined. Let me make this clear. THERE IS NO PRESUMPTION FOR THE NEGATIVE IN LD. The rules are absolutely clear on this. You might wish there was a presumption for the negative, especially if you are, say, on the negative side, or you’re a judge who is unable to follow the arguments very well and didn’t bring a coin to surreptitiously flip while the debaters are otherwise engaged, but that does not make it so. Let me add this: ALL DEBATERS, AND ALL JUDGES, NEED TO KNOW THIS. And, of course, they need to know all the other rules as well. Keep in mind that knowing and following the rules does not mean you agree with them; study M. Rousseau on the subject of the General Will if you need to learn more about this. And if you are a total clown you can run a performative critique of the rules somehow, an act of debate civil disobedience if you will, but by the definition of c.d., you should be willing to accept the consequences of that action (i.e., losing the round).
As I said, the rules are important mostly to 1) the debaters and 2) the judges. The problem is that often 1) the debaters and 2) the judges don’t really care about these rules. Either they subscribe to their own mythologies (and they are mythologies: there are no alternate rules posted anywhere generally available to debaters and judges, so it’s not as if there is some other orthodoxy that can be consulted) or they simply don’t understand the rules that do exist, but in either case, it’s tantamount to the rules not existing, which means not only that anything can happen in a round, but that there is no way of predicting what will happen in a round, or more to the point, how what happens will be adjudicated. LD is not a game without rules, it is a game without people paying attention to the rules. There’s a big difference between the two. LD doesn’t pay attention to the rules to such a degree that we often mandate that each judge post his or her own rules just so we have some idea of what to expect from our adjudicators. We call these individual rule sets paradigms, and they can contradict the rules from NFL completely, and they can contradict all the other judges at a tournament, where every judge can have a unique paradigm different from every other judge, meaning that there is no normal expectations from rounds whatsoever. The thing is, we have begun to accept judge paradigms without any questioning whatsoever. A judge is a good judge because his or her paradigm is posted, not because the paradigm is a meaningful attempt to adhere to the rules of LD. While I’m perfectly willing to accept that there are measures of interpretation possible within the rules, at the point where paradigms become alternate rules they are, at best, counterproductive, and certainly counterintuitive, and probably countereducational. Compare, for instance, the subject of history. We can approach history in a variety of ways, from a variety of paradigms, in other words. We can look at history are a series of biographies of important people, or as the movement of the vast mass of people in daily life, or as the consequence/motivation of geography or any other of the usual disciplined approaches to the subject. Each approach yields a different view of events, with different priorities and analytics, but the facts remain the same, and the history itself is unchanged. And none of these paradigms can eliminate the other paradigms and say that they don’t matter; they just aren’t prioritized. In application to LD, a judge may like critical theory arguments, for example, believing that a resolution can be best understood through these analyses, but that does not make other analyses any less effective; they are just less preferred by that judge. But at the point where the judge may believe in a presumption for the negative, or that V/C standards are unnecessary, or that not arguing the resolution is acceptable, then we’ve gone off base. And there are plenty of judges whose paradigms are exactly that. And since LD is competitive, and people want to win, who can blame debaters (the 1 in the equation of this article) from trying to play the game the way the judges (the 2 in the equation of this article) imagine it? That’s probably the only way to win, after all.
Who’s to blame here for an activity with competing rules, where every judge is reigning over a private duchy of understanding/misunderstanding of the rules? A lot of people. Blame the NFL, as we discussed yesterday, for not policing the activity. Blame the bully pulpit of the TOC, which leans toward picking your judges (mutual preferences) rather than a belief that a good LDer should be able to convince any (trained) judge. Blame your average invitational that insists on paradigms but pays no attention to them. Blame coaches who don’t insist that the judges they hire abide by the rules, and who don’t train new judges, especially parents, but simply throw them to the wolves to cover an entry and the results be damned. Blame the college student judges who believe that the activity would be so much better if we only did it their way (a thought in which they are often sincere, and perhaps even right at times, but nonetheless misguided in thinking that they are central players rather than hired guns). Blame a lot of people. It doesn’t matter. Maybe these are the cause and maybe they’re not.
What we need to do is fix it, not whine about it.
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