While the previous two installments of the “Bad Cards” series highlighted popular but low-quality impact cards, this is not the only way that awful evidence is used in high school debates. In the third edition of the series, the issue is not the credibility of the evidence’s author or the veracity of its content so much as the context in which it was written—a blog about a high school debate topic written by a part-time coach and former debater whose goal was to improve the quality of debates about the legal system, not produce evidence to be cited in contest rounds. Debaters should discontinue their use of this evidence—the “Harrison ‘05/’06” cards—on the grounds of both fairness and education.
OVERVIEW/THE CARDS
While coaching part-time at Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart on the 2005-2006 Civil Liberties topic, Lindsay Harrison maintained a blog called Legal Debate that discussed the intersection of debate argumentation and legal scholarship and theory. When announcing the blog’s creation in September of 2005, Harrison—a former champion debater at The Greenhill School and the University of Southern California and a rising star in the legal world—explained her motives in creating the site:
This blog intends to provide a forum for high school debaters debating this year’s Civil Liberties topic to engage in discussions with law professors about the topic. Many of the arguments that reoccur year after year in the debate community are areas where law professors have special expertise: federalism, presidential powers, separation of powers, the hollow hope, critical legal studies, etc.
My hope is that this forum functions as a site for clarification of debaters’ questions about the law, as well as a site for argument innovation.
In addition to posting a summary of her academic qualifications, Harrison included an explicit disclaimer about the citation of her blog as evidence in debates:
Disclaimer #2: I work occasionally as a judge and part-time, pre-round coach for Carrollton (School of the Sacred Heart). Nothing in this blog is available exclusively to Carrollton debaters, nor do any of my posts exist for the purpose of providing evidence for debaters.
Throughout the 2005-2006 season, Harrison posted articles discussing a broad range of legal topics. Despite Harrison’s disclaimer, debaters—thankful for the well-written and easily accessible application of legal concepts to debate arguments—began citing the Legal Debate blog as evidence in contest rounds. The most popular cards were those used to bolster the negative’s argument that court decisions link to the politics disadvantage; other popular cards included affirmative responses to the Hollow Hope disadvantage and to judicial process counterplans.
There was a certain degree of controversy about the practice of reading evidence from Legal Debate during the remainder of the season, but a firestorm did not erupt until the Supreme Court topic in college debate. In September of 2006, Harrison posted another disclaimer on her blog reiterating that it was not to be used as evidence in debates:
(2) To clarify, I do NOT intend that anything on this site be read as evidence in a debate. This site is merely meant to clarify certain legal questions for the debate community. In my opinion, evidence should be peer-edited, or at least edited by someone. Nothing on this site has been edited or checked by anyone else. I recommend that you do NOT use anything posted here in an actual debate.
Despite this disclaimer, college debaters continued to cite the “Harrison ‘05/’06” evidence. In March, Harrison posted a message to e-Debate disavowing this practice yet again:
It has come to my attention that teams are reading “evidence” from a debate blog that I ran last year when the high school topic was a legal one. I started the blog because, in judging debates on the topic, I was frustrated by what I saw as misunderstandings of the legal system by many in the debate community. I also was frustrated by a lack of creativity in devising arguments as a result of a lack of broad legal knowledge. I intended the blog both to educate and to generate new ideas for argumentation. I did NOT intend the blog to be used as evidence, especially not in college debates where I figured the community would recognize that none of my posts were peer-reviewed (or reviewed by anyone at all), none of my posts were backed up by specific research, and none of my posts would ever qualify as “legal scholarship.” In fact, I am merely giving people ideas for arguments and I do not necessarily advocate any of the ideas as my own – I consider evidence to be taken out of context if it says, “debaters should argue that bush would get credit” and folks read only the part suggesting “bush would get credit,” thereby attributing that idea to me.
When I found out that people were reading “Harrison 06” evidence from the blog as link cards on the court politics argument, I made an effort to end this. Whenever anyone read this evidence in front of me, I asked that they not do so in the future. I also posted something on the blog that I intended as a disclaimer for people not to read “evidence” from the blog.
I have been traveling internationally for several months and, upon my return, I found out that people have continued to read this evidence in debate rounds. Accordingly, I am now sending this to edebate in the hope that the community will recognize definitively that I do not want blog posts from my debate education blog to be read as “evidence” in rounds.
Please do not read evidence from my debate education blog in rounds. I consider it to be taken out of context. I hope that if people do read this evidence in rounds that judges will penalize those teams for reading evidence that the author considers out of context.
In addition to issuing this public statement on e-Debate, Harrison deleted all of the posts on the blog (with the exception of those cited in this article) and issued a final admonition about citing her blog in debates:
(3) I have discovered that people are citing posts made here as evidence in college debates, which was never my intent. Accordingly, I will be shutting this blog down and removing previous posts. Hopefully, this will put an end to the practice of citing this blog in debates.
This announcement spurred a vibrant discussion on e-Debate; a complete list of postings is available in the March 2007 archive. After the controversy died down, it seemed like the issue would finally be resolved: the posts had been taken down and there was general agreement that Harrison’s writing on Legal Debate should no longer be used as evidence in contest rounds.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS EVIDENCE
Fast forward to the 2009-2010 season and high school debaters are once again citing evidence from Legal Debate to support their arguments about the judicial branch. Since Harrison’s posts have been removed—and are not available from the Wayback Machine—it is clear that students are simply recycling cards from old backfiles without checking to make sure the original source still exists.
The citation of Legal Debate is almost certainly not nefarious: current high school seniors were in eighth grade when the Civil Liberties topic was being debated and it is highly unlikely that many of them were regularly perusing e-Debate at the end of their novice years (when the college controversy was at its peak).
In any case, however, the practice of reading cards from Harrison’s blog needs to stop. Even if the intentions of the author are discarded, the fact that the posts being cited are no longer available online is reason enough to discontinue their use. Were they to be reposted (either in the Wayback Machine or by an enterprising debater or coach who had saved local copies of the posts before they were removed), their use would still be in direct contravention of the author’s wishes. And even if that is not enough for some, the fact that the author indicted the credibility of her blog posts most certainly should be.
HOW TO ANSWER THIS EVIDENCE IN DEBATES
This should be an easy case to make for the team indicting the evidence: simply pointing out its context and the fact that it is no longer available online should be sufficient for the vast majority of judges. If the opposing team insists on defending the use of the evidence, reading a short card from Harrison should be enough to earn a decisive victory.
(___)
Disregard their Harrison evidence—
It’s from a blog post that is no longer available online and that was written by a debate coach to educate students about how best to make arguments about the judiciary, not to be cited as evidence. Harrison does not consider her posts to be credible evidence—the judge should not evaluate their card(s).
This is the third in a series of articles highlighting popular but poor-quality pieces of debate evidence. If you’d like to recommend a card for inclusion in this series, please leave a comment or contact the author.
I think that the Harrison evidence's acceptability is a much stickier wicket than this post would indicate. I don't want to delve into that debate, though.
It seems less problematic and more damning that Harrison's warranting explicitly assumes the Bush administration. The card may or may not be acceptable, but it's undeniably obsolete.
@antonucci
I think there was a debate to be had a few years ago (that's why I cited the e-Debate threads), but I don't think that's still the case. I know you said you don't want to delve into this debate, but I'm curious what you see as a persuasive justification for reading excerpts from Legal Debate now that the posts have been removed and the author has explicitly condemned this usage. The minimum standard for cited material seems to be publication—in the case of Legal Debate, that standard is no longer met (Harrison's writing was published, but it was subsequently unpublished—it can no longer be accessed, much less uncovered through even the most diligent of research efforts).
This is true to the best of my recollection only to the "courts link to politics" card(s). The vast majority of posts on the blog were about the judicial process as it is applied to debate arguments—disadvantages, counterplans, fiat, etc. Even if the obsolescence gripe is sufficient to discard with the Harrison "courts link to politics" card(s), it does not adequately deal with the other evidence that could be (and was) culled from her blog.
This might be a moot point because the content of Legal Debate is no longer online, but the cards are still in many squads' backfiles. I don't think it is legitimate for these cards to be read in debates; even if doing so was at one time legitimate, the fact that the posts they were cut from have been removed from the web is decisive for me.
(BTW—if those reading this haven't explored the e-Debate threads referenced in the article, I would greatly encourage it. Antonucci's "Tangential Reply To Branson" and the subsequent discussion is particularly worth your time.)
re: other cards. They just weren't as good – I remember one pretty weak "distinguish" response that no one even bothered reading on courts.
re: not accessible anywhere else
google "l1nds@y h@rr1son" politics – easy to reproduce
re: she recants.
a. Recants aren't damning because evidence isn't really based on authorial privilege – we're relying on her authority in 2005, before she took ti back. Tons of authors waffle and qualify, and we have debates about that all the time. In this case, she never retracted her warrants. She just said – meh, hate it, and blogs are bad. Kind of a 2005 arg, if you ask me. I'll take her authority on the intersection of law and politics above her insights on the publishing world.
b. I've never heard anyone complain about cards from drafts or articles and thesis drafts with strident copyright disclaimers.
This issue is volatile because we collectively know and like L1nds@y, and feel her accomplishments reflect positively on the debate community. I'm sympathetic to that argument – I've modified this post accordingly, and would support scrubbing the OP as well. That's not my general stance, though; I'm just cheerily tribalist on this one.
That said, when you say something on the Internet, it's nearly impossible to scrub it out later, particularly if it receives any attention at all. That should probably be the more important object lesson for students who assume their words will ever vanish into the ether, not the archive.
I would attempt to refute your "other cards are bad" claim, but I still can't find a copy of any of the Legal Debate posts online. I tried the recommended Google search—it returns 32,100 results. To narrow it down, I found a copy of the most popular "courts link to politics" card in a DDI file from this summer and searched for specific lines/phrases—this returned 7 results, none of which were copies of the actual article (5 are from e-Debate, 2 are from camp files). And like I said before, I tried the Wayback Machine—no dice.
I don't necessarily disagree with your position on authorial recantation, but I think this is a special case. Lindsay did not say "I changed my mind" or "I no longer believe the arguments I previously made"; she said that she never advocated these arguments in the first place. Quoting her:
Given that these posts are no longer available online (unless you were more successful than I was in your attempts to locate them), I do not think that they are "fair game" for debaters to cite as evidence even if that was not always the case.
Imagine that you're judging a debate; it's a court aff versus the politics disad. After the 1NR reads some evidence from Harrison's blog, the 1AR throws a verbal challenge flag and argues that this evidence should not be evaluated because the author recanted and removed the posts (and that they are no longer available online). What argument(s) do you feel that the 2NR could make to persuasively defeat this indict? "Authorial recantation not decisive" doesn't seem like enough; you have to account somehow for the inaccessibility of the source material being quoted, no?
How is this different from Spanos' condemnation of his evidence being read in debates? I think unless she admitted that she straight up lied about the factual basis of any of her claims there is no reason for them not to be read.
Although, I suppose that does raise the broader ethical question of what is legitimate 'evidence' in a debate round. I'm often given pause when I pull up a work-in-progress article by some writer who posts unfinished work on their website with the notice "DO NOT CITE OR REPRODUCE." Is citing and pasting content from the article illegitimate?
@Anonymous
Two meaningful differences:
1. Spanos did not publish his writing for debaters. Harrison—as the quotes above make clear—conceptualized her blog posts as advice to student-debaters who were researching the legal system and developing arguments about it. "Debaters should argue that Courts link to politics because…" is distinct from "Courts link to politics because…".
2. Spanos' work is accessible/published; Harrison's is not. This is a d-rule for me.
I think citing the Harrison cards (were the posts still publicly available) is like citing evidence from David Cheshier's Rostrum article "Is It More Important To Protect Rights or Avert War?". Cheshier is providing debaters with advice about how to weigh deontological vs. utilitarian impacts; citing excerpts from his article and presenting them as if Cheshier was making these arguments (instead of just discussing how debaters should make these arguments) is clearly illegitimate, but yet I've seen this done many times in the past.
The other cards aren't bad-bad. They just weren't really good enough to have staying power – A-/B+. When anyone says H@rris0n card, they're pretty definitely talking about the politics links.
re: the archive.
The card's reproduced in several places. Even one copy in a library would be enough. "Available" and "immediately available on the Internet" are different beasts.
If you're looking for some other archived posts, enter http://web.archive.org/web/*/legaldebate.blogspot… into your browser. This turns up a more comprehensive set of available links than the initial query, although still fails to produce the card you want. It produces several other cardable articles, though.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070129084954/http://… might be one example.
There are some other solutions to the robots problem here; I'll get back to you. Don't have time now.
re: Challenge flag:
Bracketing archive question, 2NR is easy.
"H@rris0n never recants substantive warrants about political cover. She just editorializes about how blogging makes her sadface. We advocate her legal scholarship but reject her call as a ev referee.
Dismiss her fake recant because
– she's woefully ignorant about publishing trends – blogs now crush newspapers so she mispredicted in 2k7 – she's smart about the law but misses the boat on that call in the one error she's ever made
– the aff cards aren't peer-reviewed either and come from a swamp of staff writers and bias and fluoridated Communism
– rules refs are bad – debate theory specifically should exclude any cards – debaters should get substance from the outside, but make the rules themselves. That's key to preserve the self-reflexive rule fluidity that sustains debate's unique pedagogical value and solves both substantive and format staleness. Include H@rr1s0n as a player but reject her as a ref.
– it's an analytic at worst; our warrants still beat their old card regardless of authority questions, especially since they dropped them
<blockquote cite="#commentbody-8333">
Bill Batterman :
@Anonymous
Two meaningful differences:
1. Spanos did not publish his writing for debaters. Harrison—as the quotes above make clear—conceptualized her blog posts as advice to student-debaters who were researching the legal system and developing arguments about it. “Debaters should argue that Courts link to politics because…” is distinct from “Courts link to politics because…”.
2. Spanos’ work is accessible/published; Harrison’s is not. This is a d-rule for me.
I think citing the Harrison cards (were the posts still publicly available) is like citing evidence from David Cheshier’s Rostrum article “Is It More Important To Protect Rights or Avert War?“. Cheshier is providing debaters with advice about how to weigh deontological vs. utilitarian impacts; citing excerpts from his article and presenting them as if Cheshier was making these arguments (instead of just discussing how debaters should make these arguments) is clearly illegitimate, but yet I’ve seen this done many times in the past.
I can't really comment on most of this because the articles are no longer available…I think if the goal of the blog was to promote broader education about the function of the law and politics , then it was poor pedagogy to pull it down. Harrison (why the censorship, nooch?) should have just sucked it up and allowed the debaters to make the ethics challenges rather than rob future generations of debaters the opportunity to use her site in the way she intended.
Writing a name a different way isn't censorship. It signifies that she may not want her name tossed around this discussion in a Google-able fashion. Although that horse has probably left the barn, I'd at least like to signify to potential readers in the legal community that she commands a lot of respect in debate – and any accusation of "poor pedagogy" on her part wouldn't survive the most cursory scrutiny.
People don't always want their identity all over everything on the Internet. Surely that makes some sense to you, anonymous poster? You know, because you're posting. Anonymously. So people can't see your name. Because you're "censoring" it.
Allowing everybody to see everything you've ever written is not a prerequisite to effective pedagogy. The individual in question determined that the record of the blog was no longer serving her pedagogical goals.
I'm absolutely supportive of her decision. However, I am not totally sure that author recants, as a general principle, should be dispositive. At a minimum, they're much easier to debate around than an author's idiocy (Corsi) or fraud (SChina Morning Post).
The archive issue is troubling – I don't have a good answer to that, really. If someone really wanted to use the card, they'd need a full post of the original on their own public blog or at a local library. There are some ways around the scrubbing, but I should probably keep them to myself.