Basic Case Structure – Inherency
Since NFA-LD is designed to be a ‘traditional policy’ debate format, I personally think the best case is a ‘traditional’ style policy case that consists of inherency, harms, a plan, and solvency. I thought it might be helpful to explain what each of these are for new NFA-LD students. Generally, if you can have at least one card for each section you have written a good case. Usually, however, you’ll need a few more for harms and a few more for solvency. If you are writing your first policy case I’d recommend 1 card for inherency, 3 for harms, your plan text (you write), and then 2-3 cards for solvency.
Here is a brief discussion of inherency:
Inherency – here you are looking for cards that discuss the barriers to implementing your plan in the status quo. These are also sometimes labeled the opportunity costs of the plan since passing plan necessitates removing these barriers. If plan is passed inherency should disappear or be overcome.
The NFA rules define inherency as “The inherency which prevents solving those harms or achieving those advantages or goals.” What this means to me when writing a case is to find evidence talking about the attitude of current leaders against your plan or what laws currently in place stop your plan. You may hear these being called attitudial inherency or structural inherency. The final type of inherency that works most of the time (because people rarely debate inherency anyway) is just existential inherency which means “our plan doesn’t exist – therefore our case is inherent.” I’d always shoot for the first two as it actually proves something is stopping your case.
Abrams and Novak (1997 – first reference link below) go further in providing an excellent example on why existential inherency does not help your case:
Without establishing why change will not occur in the status quo, the affirmative cannot prove that its plan will bypass or overcome the unidentified inherent barrier(s) to change. For instance, if an affirmative argued anytime between the era of the Supreme Court cases of Plessey vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education for legislative protection for African Americans, he or she could have presented a compelling case for change. However, a failure to identify that the Supreme Court had ruled “separate but equal” in Plessey would pose a noteworthy problem to the adoption of the affirmative plan, for any law that contrasted with the Supreme Court’s holding would likely be struck down by the Court. Thus, an unidentified barrier might stand in the way of the implementation of the plan.
You can also think of it this way – is it likely that your plan will just happen today? For a somewhat silly example, imagine that you are thirsty and want to get a can of coke. If there are cold cokes in the refrigerator that you can just go and grab we’d say the plan to get a coke is not inherent. There is nothing stopping you from getting a coke (unless you run existential inherency). Thus, there would be no need to pass a plan arguing you should get a coke if you can just get one yourself.
On the other hand, imagine there are no cokes in the fridge and you have no money to go buy one from the store. Then you would have structural inherency (the lack of money to buy a coke). Thus, the inherent barrier (lack of $) could be overcome with a plan to give you money to buy a coke.
For the biotech case that I posted here the inherency evidence was tagged “1. Private-sector patents have a blocking effect. ” and “2. These patents are must have tools for biotech development.” These two cards try to prove that currently the US has laws that protect patents on biotechnology for genetically modified foods. These laws/patents mean that others can not develop genetically modified food to use in their own country. Hopefully, this proves that there is a structural barrier to the plan (allowiing researchers in the Greater Horn of Africa to use the patents) in the status quo stopping our plan.
Remember, when you are writing a case you want to view each section separately. SO STOP THERE with inherency. A lot of cases I hear in rounds begin to argue harms within inherency but that is for another part of your case. That’s why I always recommend only having 1 or 2 cards for inherency to keep you focused on proving only that there is a barrier in the status quo to adopting your plan.
Hope this helps with understanding the first part of the basic stock issues case. Here are some references that you can continue reading about for more information:
Inherency in NFA-LD Debate
Rostrum article on inherency
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