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It was hardly a big news item at the time — a brief, tucked 16 pages into The New York Times on Oct. 20, 1952 beside a Buick ad. “GIRLS DEBATE BOYS ON ELECTION ISSUES,” the headline of the story read.

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But it was the first time, of what would eventually be thousands, that Antonin Scalia, the future Supreme Court justice, was mentioned in The New York Times.

He was just 16 at the time, a student at Xavier High School in Manhattan who was one of six high-schoolers selected to a debate panel hosted by The Times. The discussion, entitled “Will a Democratic Victory Secure Our Future?,” came in the weeks before a presidential election between the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson. W. Averell Harriman, a former secretary of commerce who would later become governor of New York, was a guest at the event, which was broadcast on television and radio.

As The Times described it, the debate pitted the young women against the young men. “The girls tried to keep talk on the domestic scene,” the article reads, “but the boys persisted in their attacks on Democratic foreign policy, which they said had lost much of the world to communism in spite of the expenditure of a great deal of money.”

The article said that the boys had argued that the economic prosperity at the time was the product of “a war economy.” “But the girls did not accept that argument, declaring that the average man had benefitted greatly under the Democrats.”

Mr. Harriman, who was once called “the last tall timber of the New Deal,” sided with the women and said that the Democratic administration should be continued.

Among Mr. Scalia’s teammates in the event was a 17-year-old named Richard Wasserstrom from Scarsdale High School. Now 80, Mr. Wasserstrom spoke by phone from his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. “I am sure you’re talking to the participant but I don’t remember anything about the event,” he said.

Mr. Wasserstrom said he did not know he had shared a stage with the future Supreme Court justice. He too, had gone on to a career in law, mostly in the academic world, as a professor of law and philosophy at Stanford and U.C.L.A. and also worked for a year as a lawyer with the Justice Department’s civil rights division in 1963. He said he and Mr. Scalia probably fell on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum.

“I would never have identified myself as a Republican,” he said. “I think the boys were assigned defending this position.”

Justice Scalia was already developing some ideas of his own.

“Scalia would later recall that watching Harriman in that session made him realize for the first time that a person of national stature and good reputation could be, at least in his particular young eyes, a dolt,” wrote Joan Biskupic in “American Original,” her biography of Justice Scalia.

Justice Scalia’s next mention in the paper was 1972, when the Senate confirmed him as chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States.