Affirmative: Law and Tag Line Essay

Submitted By natefroggg
Words: 1018
Pages: 5

Affirmative LD Case|
Name: Nate Medina|
Scheduled Date of Debate: |
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Because I agree with , I stand before you today to affirm/negate today’s resolution:
Resolved:

Before I begin the constructive portion of my case, I offer the following definitions of key terms from within today’s resolution:

Definitions:

The most important value to consider in today’s debate is because

Directions: Look through your case briefs for evidence cards that suit your case. Don’t pick the first three that you find. Choose the cards that are going to be the most difficult to attack and the easiest to defend. Keep your CORE VALUE Cut and paste the exact words into the appropriate boxed areas below. Summarize the card on the unboxed lines.

Contention 1:
Tag Line: The term imminence when determining a threat is useless – look at necessity instead

Card: Importantly, commentators have recognized that “imminence” is a political term, rather than a moral argument about justification of force, which is more accurately captured by the requirement of “necessity.” Imminence is therefore a political judgment that the temporality of the threat is the best indicator of whether self-defensive force is necessary. If courts interpreted imminence to mean only a threat that was temporally proximate, there should be little to no discussion of the defendant’s perception of imminence in cases where there is a contemporaneous confrontation. During a confrontation, the threat is – by definition – temporally imminent. However, a recent comprehensive survey of self-defense cases over the last twenty years found that, counterintuitively, the “vast majority of imminence-relevant cases” were solidly confrontational and did not deal with imminence as a temporal concept at all… The observation that values other than temporality are often imported through the concept of imminence is not unique to battered woman cases. The value judgments covertly made in battered woman cases are also made in mutual combat “bar fight” cases in which temporality should similarly be a nonissue because of the contemporaneous confrontation.
With the element of temporality met, the imminence inquiry enables the factfinder to allocate blame by determining an “initial aggressor” or imposing a “pre-retreat” rule.
However, in both cases the inquiry is inappropriate: no jurisdictions require “pre-retreat” to avoid a confrontation. The common law of self-defense protects “the freedom to move.”
Furthermore, even in these two situations, “it is one thing for jurors or judges to confuse imminence with leaving the confrontation; it is another to confuse it with leaving the relationship.” If imminence in practice serves as a proxy for other self-defense factors – questions of motive and emotion and retreat, it is necessary to address those factors, and the underlying value judgments, directly. If jury instructions and statutes articulated the specific factors that we actually accept in practice as defining “necessary” self-defense, they would allow self-defensive actions that look more anticipatory, but retain the requisite level of necessity… temporal imminence alone is insufficient to ascertain necessity.

(Citation) By: Wallace, Shana, of the University of Chicago. “Beyond Imminence: Evolving International Law and
Battered Women’s Right to Self-Defense.” University of Chicago Law Review, Fall 2004.

Contention 2:
Tag Line: Self-defense should equate to psychological defense as well

Card: As indicated earlier, the law of self-defense equates “self” with only the corporeal aspects of human existence—physical life and bodily integrity. But outside the law, self is commonly understood to encompass not only those corporeal aspects of existence, but also those