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The current high school debate resolution is “Resolved: In the United States criminal justice system, jury nullification ought to be used in the face of perceived injustice.”
Although the resolution doesn’t seem to have a generic bare plural, is it correct to only talk about one kind of injustice? For example, if a debater decided to only focus on racial injustice, would this be a semantically correct interpretation of the topic? Is the word injustice an example of a mass noun?
Injustice meaning the state of unfairness is a mass noun:
Jim Crow was an era of institutionalized injustice.
But the word can be particularized to mean an instance of unfariness:
The decision in Dred Scott was the injustice that made the American Civil War inevitable.
Both uses may be modified -- racial injustice, social injustice, cruel injustice -- but the debate topic simply says perceived. If you argue that perceived racial injustice is enough for nullification, won't your opponents counter that you haven't made the required point because there are other types of perceived injustice?
