Prenuptial agreements, or ‘prenups’ are signed before marriage, and dictate how assets will be divided in the case of a divorce. For example, each partner in the marriage should get 50% of the money and properties, or one gets all the money, and the other gets all the properties.

Lifestyle clauses are terms in prenuptial agreements that require a party to pay financial penalties if they violated the clause and end up getting a divorce. Such terms can prohibit a partner from cheating, the division of labour for childcare, the raising of children in a particular religion, or the amount of time partners should spend together.

An electoral-professional party is a party that is focused on the overriding goal of winning elections. This often includes hiring professionals (i.e. pollsters, PR managers, and research groups) to adjust the party’s platform to make it more appealing to voters. 

For example, after eighteen years without power, the UK's Labour Party underwent a transformative shift during the late 1990s. The development of the New Labour Party, driven by electoral professionalism, aimed to rebuild trust and signal a departure from traditional socialist policies and instead embrace free-market capitalism and neoliberal policies. This strategic move resulted in Labour’s landslide victory in the 1997 general election,  under Tony Blair.

Democrats have won five out of the last nine US presidential elections (the popular vote in seven out of nine), but they have appointed only three of the nine sitting justices on the US Supreme Court. Currently, there is a 6-3 Republican advantage on the court that will likely persist for decades. Decisions that the current US Supreme Court court has presided over include Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the court held that the Constitution of the US does not grant the right to an abortion and overturned the precedent set half a century ago in Roe V. Wade.

Court-packing refers to the act of altering the number of judges on a court, typically by increasing the seats and appointing judges with a particular political agenda to influence the court's ideological composition.

It is January, 2024. You’re an extremely talented and successful debater in your final year of university who has just finished debating at the World University Debating Championship (WUDC). Throughout your childhood and early adulthood, debating has been your life’s greatest passion. Since middle school, you have tolled away for hours each week improving your skills with coaches, attending debate tournaments nearly every weekend, and throughout the way, both you and your parents have invested significant amounts of money for you to participate in the pursuit of debating so that you can one day achieve your dream of becoming a World Debating Champion. 

Many, including yourself, have considered you becoming a World Debating Champion inevitability. In high school, your national team lost in a 5-4 decision in the WSDC finals, and since then you have attended university tournament after tournament. You’ve won tournaments such as HWS Round Robin, EUDC, and Oxford IV just to name a few.  

It is your dominance on the university debate circuit and your superior skill that made this year’s WUDC so heartbreaking: You lost the finals to your back-half in a 4-3 split, as OG. For the last few weeks, you have desperately wanted to return to WUDC for one last shot at winning the title that has eluded you for so long.