The recent innovation of adapting the debate to the judge's preferred philosophy appears to have been supplanted by a converse trend: advocates now attempt to force the judge to adopt the paradigm dictated by the strategies of the debate round. The existence of such a widespread dispute over the appropriate decision making system in debate requires the development of criteria for discriminating between paradigms. Any decision system or set of decision rules can be evaluated on the basis of six criteria: (1) fitness (for the academic debate context), (2) fairness (to each team), (3) clarity and consistency, (4) facilitation of the decision making process, (5) encouragement of quality argumentation, and (6) application of criteria from original context (if any). These criteria serve as a set of "topoi" for the advocate faced with the burden of defending a particular decision rule in the course of a debate. The criteria also allow a variety of particular decision rules. In selecting a policy, the judge may follow guidelines in four areas: presumption, costs and benefits evaluation, probablistic treatment, and counterplans. Decision rules permit sorting of competing claims in these areas, and the eventual rendering of a decision. (HOD)