Urban Debate National Championship

2025 — Atlanta, GA/US

Policy Debate Division

Topic and Format

Students will debate the national high school policy debate topic for 2024-25

  • Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks.

Tournament rounds will follow the 8-3-5 cross-examination debate format with 8 minutes of preparationtime allocated to each team during the debate.

Preliminary Rounds

Each team will compete in 6 preliminary debates, after which the top 16 teams* will participate inelimination rounds. (See the note about division sizes and the number of elimination rounds below).

Teams from the same league will not debate against one another in the preliminary debates.

Preliminary debates will be assigned one qualified judge.

Round Pairing Procedure:

  • Rounds 1-2 will be randomly pre-set respecting league blocks.
  • Round 3-6 will be power matched high-low off the results of all previous debates at the time ofpairing.