Black Boxes and Banana Peels: A Conversation with Joe Patrice About AI, Comedy, and Writing About the Law

Joe Patrice debated for the University of Oregon and coached high school debate in Oregon. He then coached at NYU, and for the last 20 years has coached the Army debate team. Joe practiced law before transitioning to a career in journalism. He is currently the Senior Editor at Above the Law. Joe sat down with CoLab Debate Executive Director Emily Cordo to discuss debate, AI, and his career in law and journalism.

EC: A lot of debaters go into law, but the pathway from debate to law to journalism is a lot less crowded. How did you end up in journalism?

JP: I went to law school at NYU while I was also coaching debate at NYU. After law school I went into private practice, and was practicing law initially at a big global firm, then a smaller white-collar litigation boutique. Around the time of the Great Recession, I realized I had paid off my loans and didn’t have to do it anymore. That got me thinking about creative ways of utilizing my law degree. I still, obviously, had paid a lot to become a lawyer, so what was I going to do with it? I started by doing some writing, freelance at first. I became a columnist at Above The Law, which covers the legal industry. When they needed a full time person I transitioned into that. So it was kind of a back door trip to journalism, but it was based on finding a way to utilize my legal education without being a lawyer per se.

How did debate influence how you write?

Debate definitely helps with being able to process a lot of information quickly and develop a point of view about it. At the same time, it's useful for identifying key counterarguments. Acknowledging and dealing with the obvious counterarguments elevates your ability to write a point of view piece. Without that, it’s just a Reddit rant. 

Did practicing law also influence your writing? 

I would say debate, more so than law, prepared me for this kind of work. Practicing law, especially the kind of litigation I was working on, tended to be super long-tail work. You get a case, you learn a lot about that case, and it drags on for two or three years before it comes to a conclusion. Journalism is much more like debate. I see a story that requires some commentary and analysis. 
I do the research and analysis. I reach out to people to get quotes. I formulate that, and I'm able to create a point of view (with arguments and analysis and hopefully humor), get it done, published, and then move on to the next thing. 

Debate, more than anything that I've done over my career, teaches that sort of compartmentalization. This round happened, it's over, I need to go to this next round. 
And yet I need to carry the lessons from one round to the other. But the next round… now it's a poetry Aff or something like that. It's a completely different story than what I just had to do, and I have to adjust to that on the fly. It's an iterative process where you're learning all the time, but also you have to stop and say, “Now put that one aside. 
I've got to concentrate on this new problem, turn it out, and move on.” 

Debate does force you to learn at a demanding pace.

There are some very lucky journalists in this world who get to write whenever they feel like, maybe trying to complete something once a week. Those people are very annoying. I’m trying to write two to three articles every day. I'm trying to come up with new stuff and cover all of these bases. I have different beats, and I'm getting people bugging me about writing their story, and there’s pressure to put out a bunch of stuff that's all distinct. Debate has done a lot to teach me to be able to do that while keeping myself compartmentalized and organized throughout the day. Obviously, if any of those magazines want to hire me to write one article a week, I’ll go! But I'm at home with this pace, largely because of how debate trained me.

In a fast paced environment like that, do you find opportunities for advocacy that makes a real impact?

Yeah. There’s a recency bias, but I’d say a good example is the work we’ve done on these nine major law firms who all agreed to give Trump free legal services in exchange for him not picking on them. We’ve been pretty active in saying that's not cool, and staked out that position early. We got a lot of press for that–we were in the Times, and so on–and that’s been really good. 

During COVID, I took a strong stance on Bar Exam reform, which I've been pretty active in writing about. 
It's a dumb test that shouldn't exist. To the extent we need some sort of a licensing exam, this is not it. I've been doing a lot of work on that, and I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback. There were advocacy groups and students reaching out at the time and saying that I was very helpful. 
They were having fights with their own local Bar, and they were able to cite things that I had written to help them. 

Also, recently, I was cited in an appellate decision that overturned someone's robbery conviction. It was some of my tech coverage. It was a facial recognition situation, where he'd been convicted and law enforcement refused to reproduce how they use facial recognition technology. The court cited some articles I'd written compiling evidence of how unreliable a lot of that technology was. 
So that was cool, to have a tangible impact there. 

Wow. It’s so important to be willing to take the risk of putting good work out into the world, not knowing what exactly will happen to it, accepting that you lose control over it, and people will react to it in unforeseeable ways, for better or worse.I bet you have a lot of examples of both.

Yeah. 
I was cited in a law review article. And several years ago a federal judge, at the Federalist Society national event, used his opening keynote remarks to go off on me and a few other people, talking about how awful we were. So that was fun. There's no credential quite like having the right enemies. 

Also, Donald Trump filed a motion to get a case against him thrown out based on something I wrote. So that was weird. It was the civil fraud case. He was trying to get the judge kicked off of that case. The judge had worked as an editor on a newsletter for his fellow high school alums, where he compiled Funny Stories Of The Month, and he included a story of mine and another Above the Law columnist. Trump moved to have the judge kicked off the case because the judge thought that Liz and I were funny, so that meant the judge was biased against Trump. So that was… interesting. 


Above The Law has a much more comedic or satirical tone than you see in most legal publications. Is that important to you as a writer?

I have a snarky style that is kind of a product of coming up in a particular era of the internet–things like Gawker were big at the time–so being irreverently funny in the coverage was always part of how I approached writing. A lot of the publications I’ve worked for use sarcasm and humor to make the bad news go down easier. 

Humor can be a very effective tool for engaging and persuading. Is there space for humor in debate?

As a debater I started more seriously, but as I went on I tried to do some funny stuff. 
We had a couple of funny affirmatives while I was debating. As a coach, I definitely think humor can go very wrong in debate, but I did always appreciate the people who were good at it. I was coaching at NYU around the time that West Georgia was notably very funny, using their deep debate experience to make jokes about debate that operated on a meta level. 
A lot of people dismissed them as not serious, but that was not really true. They were very serious, but the joke was part of the seriousness. 
I was a big fan of watching them debate. So, yeah, there is a place for humor, and it can add to the persuasion factor. 


There is something to be said for the ethos involved in being humorous, for example, using good natured humor to make you come across as less hostile and more reasonable. And there's also a value to deep sarcasm, sometimes, as an indicator of confidence level, as long as it doesn't get to the level of being disrespectful, There are places for it. 

I think there’s a tendency to think of persuasion as requiring the gravitas that comes with being a Very Serious Person. But Arthur Kessler, in The Act of Creativity, writes about comedy and how unexpected punchlines create a sort of explosive collision of ideas that takes the listener by surprise and wakes them up and gets them thinking in an unexpected new way.  

I go back to the West Georgia stuff. They would read arguments like Time Cube, and all these dumb conspiracy-based arguments that we laughed at, but then they would utilize that as a meta commentary on shoddy research practices. I found that their debates had an ebb and flow. They followed this path of saying ridiculous stuff, waiting for the other team to say, "Hey, this is all ridiculous and nonsense," and then they’d pull a turn midway through it, and it became more meta. A lot of the conversation was about what people considered good evidence and good argumentation, stuff that had trickled into debate by tradition and orthodoxy that was probably not justified other than “We make this argument because everyone makes this argument.” Personally, at University of Oregon, I made similar arguments–for example about politics disads being based on shoddy Sacramento Bee research–really trying to make serious arguments about the probabilism of it all, and that never really resonated. Meanwhile, these West Georgia guys made a bunch of arguments about the Time Cube and conspiracy theories, and it resonated better. Their ability to go outside of the serious made their argument much more persuasive. 

As a Whitman debater of a particular era, I feel compelled to argue that even the process of constructing a garbage econ disad from sentence fragments from the Bee, plus the Mead card, had educational value.

There was an Oregon high school coach back in the day who used to say that debate is really just an elaborate trick we've come up with to hoodwink kids to go to the library. I took that one to heart. A lot of the value from debate comes from the research skill part of it rather than the actual act of persuading. The ability to read a bunch of different perspectives and evaluate them and come to a conclusion about what is quality evidence, versus not, is a huge takeaway. The research skills ultimately matter more to your day to day life, especially in jobs like law, than the actual getting up and having five answers part of debate. But getting up and having five answers is the fun part that gets people to exert the time and energy to get that evidence together and learn good research skills. 

CoLab is taking a hard look at how AI is beginning to intersect with debate. How do you think AI is going to affect debate and the research skill component?

One issue I’ve heard about that I do think is serious is that there are AI companies who are scraping the case list for data, and the high school students' names are on the case list. 
So AI companies are getting personal identifiable information about students. 


That said, when I’m gearing up for a new topic, I use AI. Recently someone I know was trying to do some research on the topic, and I asked if she’d tried asking the Deep Research ChatGPT. She was resistant, and I get it, but it'll search all the JSTORs and stuff, and be like, "Here's a bunch of things you should know about this topic, with links.” Obviously you still have to do the research, but she admitted it saved several hours, which is impressive. 


But the craziest thing about it is that at the bottom of the search results the ChatGPT said, "So you're doing this for debate purposes. Would you like me to take a stab at organizing them into a 1AC format?” 

What?
!

It knows what that is. It's like, “Do you want me to try and get a nine minute 1AC format? Would you also like some blocks against particular arguments?” 

I think the fight over fabricated evidence is going to come back big and real quick.

That’s shocking to me. Then again, while I was at Whitman, our team was at the forefront of using computers to scan evidence and create briefs electronically. People said “This is going to destroy debate!” Now students don’t have to ruin their backs carrying tubs, and they can exchange evidence electronically in real time. 

Yeah, I'm a little more pessimistic about paperless. It's been super useful, in a lot of ways, but I find that the new kids are overreliant on it and don't understand flowing. They think, "Well, I have all the evidence, so I can just follow along there." At least three or four times a year when I judge a debate, I make a decision and the losing team asks, "How could that be? That's not in the document." 
And I say, "Right, but they said it. See… they said a thing that wasn't in the document. You didn't write it down, and then you never answered it.” That's been the negative of paperless. It was one of those things that was so good for the first generation of the technology, because debaters knew how it all worked, and the tech just made the process a little better. 
But now we're starting to get to that group who doesn't understand why it works. 

What other challenges of adaptation do you see in the pipeline for debate?

I'm deeply concerned about the death of search, both as part of how the internet works and also as part of the way debate works. 
Because while I did say that we utilized AI to get a quick primer on things, deep down, I'm a little concerned about an algorithm deciding which sources are the sources you want to read. They are a kind of black box, these algorithms. They hyperprivilege certain sources, certain perspectives, and that can have a kind of obscuring and homogenizing effect. So that worries me. 
If you don't know how to do your own search, you’re handing over to these algorithms the sovereignty over what your search is.

Do you think that this trend means that debaters who do learn to research effectively are going to have a major advantage, or that the overall cultural shift will make those kinds of skills kind of meaningless, because nobody will care anymore about whether your research is good or not, only whether your result is in conformity with the answer preferred by the algorithm?

Interesting. I think this could be the point I was talking about earlier, for debaters, when the research is more important than actually making the arguments. I think this may be that synthesis, because you need to be able to find the evidence that is not what the algorithm spit out, and you need to be in a position to explain to people who are unwilling to question the algorithm why they need to question the algorithm. 

Recently, I pointed out to a law professor that he was wrong about a factual situation, and he typed it into his phone in front of me and said, "No, no, I'm right," and showed it to me. You know what it was? It was the Google summary. The Google summary was wrong–I went into the  actual documents underneath it–but that's worrisome, because that’s an actual law professor, right? The ability to not only be skeptical of those summaries, then to be able to find the actual answers, matters. Understanding to go to a transcript, because it was about congressional testimony. I know how to go get that testimony–as opposed to some other people–and then to be able to explain where it went off the rails. 
I was able to explain not just, “Hey, it's wrong,” but “I know why it's wrong. The AI took these two pieces of data, and it decided to merge them, which was wrong. That's how it got to be wrong.” Sometimes explaining how it got to be wrong is the only way you can convince somebody that AI actually was wrong. So I think that debate skills are going to be more important than ever.