Section 8: Within each four-year cycle the national topic should reflect a rotation of include at least one of each of the following topic categories:

1) Domestic – A topic that relates to issues within the United States.

2) Legal – A topic that relates to a controversy within legal jurisprudence and where the topic wording emphasizes legal research.

3) International – A topic of primarily international relations or policy.

A single topic may satisfy multiple categories, for example, domestic and legal. 

When soliciting papers, the topic committee should announce if that topic must include one of the categories. 

The idea of this proposal is that a topic may count towards fulfilling multiple categories in the topic rotation.  Some themes from our working group included that there is a lack of clarity about what each area really means, that people try to force topic ideas into the rotation rather than writing the best form of the topic, and that there is a lot of blurring in areas such that the research and literature considered for many topics may fulfil the purpose of the rotation.