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Southtown Star

Greenberg, now a pre-med student in his junior year at Duke University, said he had his concerns about global issues nurtured while he was on the debate team at Homewood-Flossmoor High School.

"Being on the team exposed me to a slew of social issues and what's happening in the world. It cultivated my interests," said Greenberg, who was at the top of H-F's 2007 graduating class.

In response to a question from a debate team coach in the crowd, McGovern spoke about the four years he spent on the debate team in high school, and a further four years in college.

Albany Times Union

Wherever you stand right now on the dispute over health care reform, surely you can agree that we're not witnessing a display of the idealized vision of democracy we were bequeathed by our Founding Fathers.

Shouting down elected officials trying to conduct issue-focused forums is not behavior we learned in elementary school civics lessons. Name-calling and intentional distortion of facts are antithetical to the debate that ought to frame public decision-making.

What we are experiencing, in fact, is the result of what John Sexton, one of America's most brilliant educators, described a few years ago as the decline of civil discourse in American society.

Princeton seemed to Sotomayor a more plausible path because -- as would happen repeatedly for her -- someone already there and willing to help her urged her to apply. In this case, it was an undergraduate from a poor family like hers, who had been a year ahead of her at Spellman and helped coach her for high school debates.

Debate alum Tom Goldstein:

I’ve now completed the study of every one of Judge Sotomayor’s race-related cases that I mention in the post below.  I’ll write more in the morning about particular cases, but here is what the data shows in sum:

Other than Ricci, Judge Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases while on the court of appeals. 

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions.  Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous.  (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.)  Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge.  In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case.  So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1.

Read the rest of the article here

April 22, 2009

Following in the footsteps of Laurence Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky, Tom Goldstein and Neal Katyal, former USC standout policy debater Lindsay Harrison won her first case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court today:

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/todays-opinions-40/

More background on the case and details regarding Lindsay's oral argument (back in January '09):

http://abajournal.com/news/1st_oral_argument_for_jenner_associate_is_in_us_supreme_court/

http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2009/01/the-am-law-litigation-daily-january-5-2009.html

Congratulations Lindsay - we're proud of you!

Gordon R. Mitchell
Associate Professor of Communication
Director, William Pitt Debating Union
University of Pittsburgh
CL 1117, 4200 Fifth Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Phone: (412) 624-8531
Fax: (412) 624-1878
http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonm/