They traveled by bus to Florida competitions and stayed at Vacation Inns. They flew to Ivy League campuses for nationwide meets. That’s how Choose Jackson fell in love with Harvard, which she would later attend for her undergraduate and legislation levels.

“All of us did find yourself in Ivy League faculties,” quipped Ms. Chafetz, who went to Cornell.

Choose Jackson competed in two disciplines that had been extra speech than debate: oratory, the place contestants write and ship authentic speeches, and interpretation, the place they carry out dramatic or humorous elements from current materials. She was a nationwide champion in oratory.

Ms. Berger died in 2008. Choose Jackson was amongst a number of debaters quoted in her Miami Herald obituary.

The debaters’ résumés are spectacular. Nathaniel Persily, a constitutional legislation professor at Stanford. Choose Laura Anne Stuzin of Florida’s eleventh Judicial Circuit. Benjamin G. Greenberg, the promenade date turned United States lawyer, now in personal apply.

“It’s like physician, physician, professor, professor, lawyer, lawyer, professor, choose, choose, physician,” mentioned Stephen F. Rosenthal, a Miami lawyer who has recognized Choose Jackson since junior excessive and counts her as one in every of his greatest mates. He met his future spouse, Mindy Zane Rosenthal, a debater at Miami Seashore Senior Excessive, in a contest. (Then he went to Harvard.)

Final month, when Choose Jackson’s title floated to the highest of most lists of candidates to interchange the retiring Justice Stephen G. Breyer, even Palmetto debaters who had been now not in frequent contact started texting one another to gawk. Somebody despatched round a photograph of the controversy crew from again within the day, and likewise a photograph of Choose Jackson and Mr. Rosenthal from their senior yearbook.