CONTENTIONS readers in the New York area might be interested to know that, tomorrow night, Intelligence Squared will be hosting a debate on the motion “Google violates its ‘don’t be evil’ motto.” (For those who can’t make the event at Rockefeller University, the debate will be broadcast later on NPR.) Hoping to raise the level of public discourse through Oxford-style debate, Intelligence Squared is modeled on a similar initiative that began in London in 2002. Having attended the Intelligence Squared debate last month, on whether guns reduce crime, I can attest that they do a great job at choosing the debaters (e.g., the arch-nemesis social scientists John Lott and John Donohue), and run the event highly efficiently and effectively, including preventing cranks and boors in the audience from ruining things.

Using a hand-held gizmo reminiscent of a TV remote control, members of the audience get to vote on the motion before and after the debate, which produces evidence of the relative persuasiveness of the two sides. Before the guns/crime debate, for instance, 13% of the audience supported the motion, 60% opposed it, and 27% were undecided. (It was an audience of New Yorkers after all.) However, after the debate, the numbers were 27% in favor, 64% opposed, and 10% undecided–to some extent, a victory for the guns-reduce-crime side.

I wonder if such small yet significant gains in the conservative or libertarian direction are part of the intent of the program. It is, in fact, funded by the Rosenkranz Foundation, which has supported the likes of the Manhattan Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Federalist Society. And as Steven Teles makes clear in his important book The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, a large part of the success of that movement resulted from merely getting liberals to listen to the best arguments from the other side, which they had otherwise never been exposed to. (How many “liberals” today follow John Stuart Mill’s demand that they constantly test their ideas against their most formidable opponents?) Thus, it is no accident that the Federalist Society has been not just a networking organization but a society that hosts numerous debates at law schools and conventions, in which the conservative or libertarian argument is guaranteed to get an airing.

The conservative legal movement still has a long way to go—except for originalism and law-and-economics, conservative ideas are barely taught in law schools—but hosting debates has nonetheless been key for its successes. And perhaps initiatives like Intelligence Squared can have such an effect in a larger domain.