Part 7 in an 8-part series regressing through the Stanford 2002 APDA tournament.
Last week: Round 3 (re: Enron executives and their wallets)
Today’s round features one of my favorite opp-choice cases from my senior-year case-writing binge. The case was pretty successful, though it did lose handily once. It engaged in a question I generally didn’t believe in, that being the nature of war crimes. While I personally feel that the concept of “war crimes” is redundant, this case posed an interesting scenario as to whether a breakaway republic should use chemical weapons against an oppressive power if the power they’re fighting made those weapons.
This round featured the surprising choice that the republic should in fact use the weapons, which tended not to be the side opposition chose. Generally people sided with the Geneva conventions and conventional war over taking the risky but potentially effective move to break with international law and go after the power. But the round always made for fun international debate that didn’t rely on having just read the Economist.
This round also features one of my more absurd themed rebuttals, something that was generally my signature, but rarely had such tenuous links as this one.
