I've been in forensics, competing, coaching, and judging, for 13 years now. I've seen the evolution and change in LD over the past decade, and one of the things people do now is use a number of bad values/criteria in their cases without defining, explaining, or justifying what they are. But because it's expected, or there's some underlying understanding, or something else I can't put my finger on, we don't talk about it.

I thought I'd write a brief post which lists some of those out as a helpful guide to people wondering how to structure their standards. And if you run up against any of these standards, you can call them out. This will be a bit repetitive, but hopefully you'll get the point.

1. Morality - This is a bad value. The existence of morality itself is not to be valued. Hitler had a morality. More importantly, you need to define what morality actually is. Is it only an individual conception of right and wrong? Is it a societal consensus? The only situation in which morality could be a value is if you were debating whether no morality is better than a destructive morality.
2. Democracy - This is a bad value. Democracy is not valuable in itself. There are plenty of failed democracies in the world like Venezuela, Mexico, and others. Democracy is valuable because it represents things like human rights and freedom of speech. Without those, it is useless. There also hasn't been an absolute democracy in the world since Ancient Greece. A larger problem here is that many debaters run "democracy impacts" without answering the primary question of the value of democracy to begin with or defining their version of democracy that's applicable to the resolution, so their impacts are basically meaningless.
3. Justice - Philosophers and scholars have debated justice for millenia. What makes you think you can just plug it in, barely define it, and have it hold up? Justice isn't just "giving each their due." What does that even mean? How do we determine what each person is due? Who gives it to them? You need to define and contextualize what justice is if you want to use it effectively.
4. Utilitarianism - This is bad as a value, and often very poorly used as a value criterion. First of all, it's a philosophy, so it can't be used as a value. Your value can be happiness, or maximizing happiness, but it can't be the philosophy which determines the morality of an action. However, if your value is happiness, then your value criterion can't be utilitarianism because it neither explains how to attain the maximum amount of happiness nor does it allow us to evaluate whether happiness has been achieved. Utilitarianism is a philosophy for evaluating the morality of actions; it is not happiness itself, nor is it the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
5. The Categorical Imperative - This is not a value, and like utilitarianism, it needs to be structured properly to be used as a VC. Also, you should talk about all three maxims if you're going to use this. Kant's CI necessitated that all three conditions be met in order for an action to be moral. You shouldn't just talk about universality and call it a day.
6. Social Contract - The contract itself is not valuable. Every society has a social contract, but that doesn't mean it benefits the people, protects human rights, or is balanced in any way. Contract theorists have explained in detail what they think makes a social contract, and thereby the government, legitimate. You need that explanation in your case. Just a social contract in itself is meaningless. The contract could just say the government can kill anyone it wants any time.

That's all I have for now; maybe I'll think of more later. I hope this helps somebody out. Feel free to comment with other things you've seen.