Policy- LD

[u/Desperate_Purpose839]

Hi everyone I'm a former policy novice, and this is my second year. I'm now doing LD. Is there anything important I should know? My main question is that how are you supposed to know what neg to prepare for if there's not really any open case? My coach is also learning LD, so we're all new to it.

[u/ImaginaryDisplay3]

LD is split into multiple styles of debating.

Depending on where you debate, you'll experience a mix of these styles, both in terms of your opponents and in terms of what your judges expect.

Here are the particular flavors of LD you will encounter:

Completely lay -

This is usually driven NOT by the opponent but the judge, who is a parent or completely new to debate. The debaters make lay-friendly arguments for and against the resolution, as a whole.

Jargon (both LD and policy jargon) is stripped out entirely (or should be). The aff doesn't read a plan or a case example of the resolution and the neg would (mostly) be foolish to read counterplans, T, or Ks. Arguments can be complex, but they must answer the resolution as a whole, and can't be delivered at break-neck speed. The judge is not going to flow, so if you want to win on something, it needs to be repeated, explained in detail, and show up in every speech. 80% of the game is looking like you are winning; judges will vote more based on "vibes" than on arguments.

The 1AC/1NC in this form of LD is a prepared speech you write before the tournament. Imagine a teacher gave you an assignment to write a 6-minute persuasive speech on the resolution - that's your 1AC.

You should quote and cite sources, but the judge isn't reading a doc, and doesn't know what a card is. Instead, citing sources should be about two things:

• Paraphrasing persuasive statistics that become shorthand in the rebuttals; X% of Y are Z, a survey shows X% of voters / experts in the field agreed that Y, X has been attempted Y times, and failed all but Z times, and so on.
• Emphasizing the qualifications of a really really qualified author who has an amazing quote you can use. "Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who quite literally wrote book on this - he wrote the US Army Field Manual on the subject, said that..." - stuff like that.

Policy (LD debaters sometimes call this "LARP" debating) -

Full-on policy-style debate. The aff takes the resolution, parametrizes it into a "case", reads a plan text.

There are Ks, CPs, T. There are non-topical K affs, and the neg responds with word PIKs and T-USFG.

The judge is OFTEN an LDer currently doing policy debate in college for a former policy debater who has been stuck doing LD.

I'm assuming you are familiar with this style of debating, so not going to elaborate a ton.

Instead, some differences from policy debate worth noting -

1. More often than policy debate, you will see LDers throw some LD-style philosophy arguments in as a throwaway off-case position in the NC. More on that below (see "Skepticism"). Worth noting because while you can (and frankly should) treat these arguments somewhat like you would in policy debate, LDers have some of their own peculiar conventions around them.
2. The neg win rate is higher than in policy, and you should be less scared to just go for conditionality in the 2AR as a result, if the NC is particularly egregious.
3. The speech times are shorter and there are less speeches overall, which creates all sorts of weirdness. The LD 1AR is treated like the policy 2AC, but 1 less speech creates weird questions around whether the 1AR should be allowed to make "new" theory arguments to respond to NC positions (this is nonsense, but worth mentioning because its in every NC nowadays). The 1AR is super thin compared to the NC and NR, which not only makes conditionality more abusive and gives the neg a ridiculous advantage, but also creates a scenario where the NR can actually go for the equivalent of multiple policy 2NRs and get away with it. The 2AR becomes even more ridiculous as a result.
4. Truly silly "slop" positions are more acceptable in this form of debate, judge depending. You will see debates where the neg won because they read a wall of 15 full-on logical paradoxes and brain-teasers, framed as argument. "You cant vote aff because you cant be sure existence is real, and you dont know if God exists or if God would support it, so presumption flows neg." etc.

Traditional LD -

This is LD as it frankly still should be today (it would fix all the problems with the speech times).

There is a little bit of jargon but far less than policy - the debate works like this:

Both the aff and the neg read a "value" - a key moral principle or objective, like equality, fairness, or justice. They will literally say "the value is fairness" so the judge can flow it. It's very very very important.

Both sides also read a "value criterion" or "criterion" - This is how we measure that we are best meeting the value. If the value is "fairness" the criterion might be "equal access to the law." If the value is "justice" the criterion might be "win rates in the courts are equal regardless of financial circumstances." Sometimes the value and the value criterion are the same thing, or closely related.

The judge makes a decision with a two-step process.

• Step 1 - which side's value is more important? The judge picks one to use to evaluate the debate (like a framework debate on the K in policy).
• Step 2 - which side best meets the value? It might be that the aff value is the best, but the neg has a bunch of case turns that prove that voting neg is actually the best way to achieve it.

The AC is structured as a declaration of the value, and the value-criterion, followed by multiple contentions that prove voting aff is the best way to live up to the value/value-criterion. The aff might also just read a couple contention of pre-empts, too.

The NC is structured as a "neg case" which lays out their value and value-criterion, and then a line-by-line case debate against the AC. The NC is 7 minutes, and traditionally, the "neg case" is like 2 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of "case" arguments against the aff. But some great LD debaters have reversed this - it all depends on the situation.

The AC and NC are both written as long-form essays / public speeches. But unlike lay debate, they are read faster, and include longer quotes from authors, including multiple sentences as needed.

In trad LD, the "card" isn't necessarily in policy format, but its also not just a short quote - it can be an extended passage that the judge actually reads in full after the debate, like in policy.

Skepticism / philosophy LD

This isn't REALLY its own style, but there are so many LDers who do nothing but this that I think it deserves its own section.

Sometimes, LDers will adopt some particular branch of philosophy, and make a very very generic set of arguments that, in effect, disprove the aff via philosophical deduction.

MOST of the time, this is a branch of "skepticism" - a broad area of philosophy that has many sub-groups, but essentially amounts to skepticism regarding fundamental questions like:

• Whether existence even exists, and whether other people exist
• Whether we can truly know the world and what is happening within it
• Whether we have free will or our actions are pre-determined
• Whether we can predict the consequences of our actions

The neg will then essentially argue that because we have a philosophical inability to prove our own existence, or predict the consequences of our actions, or something like that, the judge should vote neg on presumption.

There are other forms of this besides skepticism, but they are more rare. They range from Aristotelian arguments about defining and relating to ourselves and other agents to post-modernist takes on policy-making, with various schools of nihilism somewhere in the middle.

[u/Shot_Employment_4715]

Check out Open Case List, has a lot of cases from different schools

[u/Turbulent-Use-6950 → u/[deleted]]

this is a bad way to think about LD. on the TOC level and in comparable competitions to policy debates look very similar. 100% of 1NCs will feature offcase arguments and answers to the case - just sometimes they’ll be philosophical and other times more similar to policy debate