Traditionally, the educational significance of academic debate seems to have focused on the development of general intellectual and academic skills, such as the development of critical thinking ability through debate. Is it possible, then, for debate to be used to develop argumentative skills in a specific field, rather than for its general educational function? This paper reports on the authors' experiment with ''academic debate on a legal case'' and examines the potential for academic debate to be used as an educational method in the specific field of law.

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This case study examined how experienced adjudicators make decisions in parliamentary debate, focusing on what characteristics their decisions and scoring have and how their decisions differ among them. This study analyzed judges’ decisions and scoring of two separate debate rounds (the final rounds of two national high school tournaments in Japan), adjudicated by 19 judges and 11 judges, respectively. As a result, it was suggested the individual speakers’ scores could be better understood as performance-ranking in the particular round, and judges differed in their decisions in respect to their interpretation of 1) how practical arguments and principle arguments related to each other, and 2) what burden of proof was imposed by the debate motion at hand. Some limitations and the outlook for future research, along with this study’s implications for practitioners were discussed at the end of this paper.

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