Animal-welfare advocate finds partner in growing Law School program

In 2006, Jeff Thomas swore off animal products.

For the philanthropist and Duke-educated author it wasn't one “aha” moment that turned him vegan and into an outspoken supporter of farm animals, it was a series of moments: dinner with a passionate vegetarian; the realization that a beautiful pet is essentially “no different from a beautiful cow”; the book “Animal Liberation” by Princeton philosopher Peter Singer.

Then there was the fundamental question about the human - and animal - condition.

“There is a logical path from existentially wondering how we can do the most good to helping farm animals,” said Thomas, adding: “Young people who are contemplating how to mitigate the most suffering should consider helping farm animals, where an ordinary person can positively affect millions of lives.”

Billions, in fact, when you count chickens.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 9 billion chickens, 115 million pigs, and 29 million cows were slaughtered in 2015 in the United States. Across the country, farmed animals are unprotected by any federal rules until shortly before slaughter and are exempt from the majority of state cruelty laws. Those facts stand in sharp contrast to a nationwide 2012 poll by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in which 94 percent of respondents said that animals raised for food should be free from abuse or cruelty.

The confinement of factory-farmed animals has become a hot-button issue in recent years, with McDonald's and Walmart among the more than 200 U.S. companies pledging transitions to cage-free egg supply chains. A current Massachusetts ballot initiative seeks to prohibit keeping egg-laying hens in battery cages, confining mother sows in gestation crates, and tethering veal calves so they cannot move. The proposal also calls for banning the sale of food items produced in other states using such types of confinement.

“The Massachusetts ballot measure is poised to be the single most progressive piece of farmed animal protection legislation ever passed in the United States,” said Christopher Green, executive director of Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Program. “Having this happen in our backyard as our program gets off the ground has allowed us to analyze the process in the classroom and given our students the opportunity to gain invaluable experience working directly on the campaign.”

Thomas has found a welcome partner in the HLS program. With his recent gift of $1 million and a subsequent matching gift of $500,000 to support individual donations of up to $50,000 through December, he is hoping to make farm animals central to animal cruelty prevention. It's a shared concern.

“How humans raise animals for food in this country and around the world affects animal welfare, human health, food safety, workers' rights, as well as climate change and the environment,” said Dean Martha Minow. “With the leadership of the Animal Law & Policy Program, and the marvelous generosity of Jeff Thomas, Harvard Law School pursues scholarship and work at the forefront of these critical concerns, and I am so grateful.”

Christopher Green with Kristen Stilt, HLS professor of law and the program's faculty director, Stilt's daughter, Lark, and Belle, a 14-year-old Hafflinger horse who lives at Winslow Farm, an animal sanctuary in Norton, Mass. Photo by Penelope Yan

The gift is to be used as the program's directors see fit, beyond a few important stipulations, said Green.

“Jeff wanted his resources to go toward items not already budgeted for, and he wanted the entire sum to be spent within seven years to ensure the gift would be implemented right away and help the program immediately expand upon its existing efforts.”

The gift has supported a new fellow to work on animal welfare aspects of a larger U.S. farm bill policy analysis being run by the HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic. Given the substantial impact factory farming has on animal welfare, public health, and environmental degradation, said Green, the program plans to hire additional fellows to work on farmed-animal policy in the coming year.

The program's work reaches well beyond U.S. borders. Its faculty director, Kristen Stilt, is collaborating with Harvard's South Asia Institute to examine animal agriculture from the Middle East to Asia.

This article, “Putting his money where his mouth is,” by Colleen Walsh, was originally published in the Harvard Gazette on Nov. 2, 2016.

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The Wordsmith

Sarah Hurwitz '04 found herself “pretty lost” in her third year at Harvard Law School and missing her previous life as a political speechwriter.

So when a classmate asked in the fall of 2003 whether she might like to write for Wesley Clark's presidential campaign, she said yes-eventually. Her first job on Capitol Hill, when she was just a year out of Harvard College, hadn't gone very well since she couldn't quite capture her boss's voice. And the prospect of missing classes during her final year of law school shuttling back and forth to Arkansas terrified her.

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“The defining truth about working with the first lady is this,” says Sarah Hurwitz. “She always knows what she wants to say-period.”

“But I sat back and really started to think about it and realized that if … my real passion was government and politics, then I'd better do this,” Hurwitz said during a panel discussion at Harvard Law School's Celebration 60 in 2013.

Clark left the race early, but her work on the campaign set Hurwitz on a course to work as Hillary Clinton's chief speechwriter during the 2008 presidential race and then serve in the same role for first lady Michelle Obama '88.

It was on the Clark campaign, Hurwitz said, that she learned how to be a good speechwriter while working alongside Josh Gottheimer '04. That job led to another for Hurwitz with Democratic nominee John Kerry. She worked as an associate at WilmerHale before returning to the campaign trail in February 2007 with the Clinton campaign.

After helping draft Clinton's concession speech, Hurwitz received an email from Sen. Barack Obama's chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, who followed up a few days later with a phone call offering her a job. Obama called to thank her after she wrote her first speech for him and welcomed her to the campaign.

Hurwitz began working with Michelle Obama on her speech to the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver. After writing speeches for President Obama, she would go on to work with the first lady almost exclusively for nearly six years.

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“For me, speechwriting is about telling the stories that too often just don't get told. There's a lot of quiet daily heroism in this country.”

“The defining truth about working with the first lady is this: She always knows what she wants to say-period,” Hurwitz told the Bulletin. “She has an unwavering sense of who she is and exactly what points she wants to make.”

Hurwitz has worked largely out of the public eye at the White House. There were occasional exceptions, such as a TV documentary that aired on cable networks including MTV and Nickelodeon in which she described how her public school education in Wayland, Massachusetts, paved the way for her career.

Her public profile grew considerably in July, when Melania Trump borrowed several lines from Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech, which Hurwitz helped write.

Hurwitz has not commented publicly about the incident, but the irony was not lost on her former colleague Favreau, who noted in a tweet that Hurwitz had previously worked for Clinton. “So the Trump campaign plagiarized from a Hillary speechwriter,” Favreau wrote.

Hurwitz said she “loved working with Mrs. Obama on her three convention speeches” but also described as favorites some lesser-known speeches the first lady has delivered, including this year's commencement speeches at the Santa Fe Indian School and the City College of New York.

“For me, speechwriting is about telling the stories that too often just don't get told,” Hurwitz said. “There's a lot of quiet daily heroism in this country-people who get up every day and build lives driven by love, courage, and self-sacrifice.”

Accompanying the first lady to the New York commencement made Hurwitz think of her great-great-grandmother who'd wanted her daughters to attend “one of the great public universities in New York City.” “That didn't happen, but it was pretty moving all these years later to walk onto the campus of one of these schools with the first lady of the United States,” Hurwitz said.

Hurwitz, among the few White House staffers to have served through Obama's entire two terms, declined to say whether she would have any interest in staying on should her former boss win in November.

“I'm not sure what comes next,” she said. “For now, I'm just trying to enjoy every minute of this once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Making History

Harvard Law School has produced plenty of senators, Supreme Court justices and two presidents, but no graduate has ever served as vice president.

This election has presented the first opportunity in decades to end that drought with both Democrat Tim Kaine '83 and Libertarian William Weld '70 on the ballot as vice presidential candidates.

Credit: Getty Images William Weld and Gary Johnson have described a plan to run a co-presidency.

The last Harvard Law School alumnus nominated to be vice president-Thomas Eagleton '53-was forced to withdraw as George McGovern's running mate in 1972 after just 18 days, when his prior treatment for acute depression was publicized.

The job has evolved significantly in the decades since, said Joel Goldstein '81, a Saint Louis University law professor and author of “The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden.”

Originally narrowly conceived as a legislative job presiding over the Senate, the vice president became more of a participant in the executive branch when Richard Nixon held the post in the 1950s, Goldstein said.

But it wasn't until Walter Mondale served under President Jimmy Carter that the vice president moved into the White House and became part of the president's inner circle. “For the last 40 years, across six administrations, it has really been an important institution of the presidency,” said Goldstein.

Credit: Getty Images/Johnny Lewis A friend from law school recently said of Tim Kaine (right), “He's the same guy. He's just surrounded by 25 Secret Service agents.”

Even in the modern era of the vice presidency, Kaine stands out for the diversity of his experience, said Goldstein. Kaine served as a city councilor, mayor of Richmond and then lieutenant governor and governor of Virginia before being elected the state's junior senator in 2012 alongside Mark Warner '80.

Weld is also a former governor, who led Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997 after serving as the U.S. attorney and head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division under President Reagan.

Having been a popular Republican governor in a largely Democratic state, Weld attempted to win a seat in the U.S. Senate and narrowly lost to John Kerry.

Credit: Portland Press Herald Weld and Johnson both previously served as Republican governors, Weld of Massachusetts and Johnson of New Mexico.

Weld was no stranger to the Harvard campus, having graduated from Harvard College, where his ancestors were among the original benefactors. In law school, he was a member of the Voluntary Defenders, whose members helped inmates and poor defendants prepare appeals. When asked about his membership, Weld quipped, “I should have been in the young prosecutors club,” according to a 1996 Boston Globe profile.

He worked for a Boston law firm briefly after graduation before becoming one of the first staff members for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's Watergate investigation along with a recent Yale Law School graduate named Hillary Rodham, he recalled in a 2011 interview for the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

Credit: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik Kaine has described his wife and HLS classmate, Anne Holton (right), as his “political partner.”

Kaine had never visited the HLS campus before showing up for the start of school in 1979, after finishing college at the University of Missouri in three years. He soon rethought the wisdom of moving so quickly.

“I remember thinking, why am I rushing? And also, I don't really know what I want to do with my life,” Kaine said in an interview with C-SPAN in June.

He decided to take a year off after his 1L year and served as a Catholic missionary in Honduras. “It was a transformative experience,” said Brian Wolfman '84, who met Kaine the following school year when both worked for the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project (PLAP).

Kaine recalled rejoining PLAP after his year away thanks in part to the recruiting efforts of Anne Holton '83. They started dating midway through the school year and married after graduating.

Their work together representing prisoners before disciplinary and parole hearings exemplified a common commitment to social justice they've shown ever since, said Leto Copeley '83, who met them both in law school and now practices law in North Carolina.

After HLS, Kaine followed Holton back to Richmond, Virginia, where her father had served as governor. He spent a decade as a civil rights litigator and law professor before running for city council in 1994. Holton worked as a legal aid attorney and a juvenile court judge before being appointed the commonwealth's education secretary in 2014.

Copeley has stayed in touch with Kaine and Holton, attending Kaine's gubernatorial inauguration with other law school friends and, more recently, a campaign fundraiser in Chapel Hill after his nomination. She said they're the same down-to-earth, friendly people she first met in law school.

“He's the same guy. He's just surrounded by 25 Secret Service agents,” Copeley said.

Devils in the details

German doctors killed Anna Weiss as part of a Nazi euthanasia program directed at individuals they classified as disabled.

The woman's so-called disability, as recorded in trial documents: being an “unsympathetic Czech Talmudic Jewess.”

“That 'unsympathetic' woman deserved to be named,” said Matt Seccombe, who has been the primary analyst for Harvard Law School Library's Nuremberg Trials Project. “In these mass atrocities, the names become numbers. They deserve to have their names recorded and remembered.”

In 1949, four years after the Nuremberg war crime trials began, the library received the most complete set of documents from the Nazi prosecutions outside that of the National Archives. Over the years, individuals who participated in the 13 trials have also donated their personal papers related to the cases. In 1998, the library initiated the Nuremberg Trials Project with the goals of preserving the entire collection and making it accessible online. To date, Seccombe has analyzed five trials, including thousands of documents, while scanning teams have digitized the 154,000 transcript pages and nearly 600,000 document pages for all the trials.

The recently relaunched website allows everyone from scholars and researchers to casual history buffs to access the materials. These include the transcripts and descriptions of all documents from trials one through four and seven, as well as fully viewable document pages from trials one, two, and four. The new site includes keyword-searchable full-text transcripts and enhanced viewing of documents and transcripts. The library, which has relied on donations to support the project, will publish materials from the remaining trials as more funding becomes available.

Stephen Chapman, manager of the project scanning teams, said his sense of responsibility to the project only increased as he spent more time with the documents.

“What really gives me pause is thinking about the obligation,” he said. “I have a sense of duty that I want to make sure we present comprehensive, authoritative copies. We can't afford to leave anything out.”

Along with Chapman and Seccombe, the small team on the project includes digital archivist Kerri Fleming, web developer Paul Deschner, and curator of modern manuscripts Edwin Moloy.

From the very start, Seccombe expected to struggle with the materials. In a few documents the horror is explicit, he said, while many others couch the savagery of the crimes in bureaucratese. Describing the latter, he recalled long days poring over a letter sent to Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi special police force, by a doctor proposing the chemical sterilization of inmate workers in concentration and labor camps. Himmler wrote in the margin: “Dachau,” the first concentration camp established in Germany.

“Seeing it in the letter is really striking,” Seccombe said. “By writing his instructions on that document, he set the crime in motion.”

Fleming began work on the project in 2014 as a digitization specialist, removing staples and paper clips from the fragile documents so they could be photographed through a high-speed scanner. Seeing the trial typescripts and evidence photographs carefully conserved after having been bundled up in boxes for decades made the work compelling and gratifying.

She was stunned, though, at first glimpsing Hitler's signature, and had a similar reaction to a giant organizational chart illustrating the power structure of the Nazi regime.

“It was so clinical, and I couldn't help thinking about how easy it is to make a chart,” Fleming said. “At times I felt it was too much for me to handle. One of the last boxes I opened had pictures from the concentration camps. It was startling and caught me off guard. There are a million stories that will never be told, so getting the names is really important.”

Analyzing a document can take 10 minutes or 10 hours, depending on the complexity of the material and time needed to decipher handwriting and obscure details, and to identify the key persons involved. For Seccombe, several have had “a haunting effect.”

“I had four nightmares out of five trials,” he said. “Quite a few times I was glad to walk away for a while, in order to avoid burnout.”

One hard-to-shake document was a report by Lt. Walther, a Nazi who oversaw the killing of more than 100 Jews and gypsies in Yugoslavia. The officer described how quickly his men had done the killing on the first day, before hesitating the next.

“He had followed his military orders, but at the end of the report, he said he wondered how he'd feel another night alone in his quarters. That's going pretty deep into the perpetrator's mind,” Seccombe said.

Such intense attention to the details has prompted profound conversations among staffers. Often they find themselves asking, “What would I do in these situations?”

“I don't know how we can say, with certainty, what we would have done had we grown up in that period, and all of our peers had been in the Hitler Youth and in school we had been immersed in official party ideology,” said Deschner.

“I do a gut check,” said Seccombe. “There are things I might do and things I would refuse to do.”

The soul-searching underscores the genuine personal connection Seccombe has made with the lives he has researched in the Nuremberg collection. He found a model of himself in a personnel document on a Nazi deemed unreliable by higher-ups.

“This man was supposed to go straight home at the end of the day to be a good Nazi husband and father. Instead he would wander around town, looking at this and that, and indulging his curiosity,” said Seccombe, who also has a spirit of inquisitiveness.

“They didn't get rid of him, but would have been happy to see him leave. It confirmed to me that I would have been a bad Nazi and they would have known it.”

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This article originally appeared in the Harvard Gazette on October 26, 2016.

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Permanent record

Matt Seccombe, primary project analyst; Kerri Fleming, digital projects archivist; Stephen Chapman, manager of digital strategy for collections; Paul Deschner, project manager and technical lead; and Ed Moloy, curator of modern manuscripts worked together to digitize the Nuremberg papers at Harvard Law School.

Credit: Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer Matt Seccombe: A bound stack of documents is just one of many waiting to be digitized.

Credit: Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer Kerri Fleming: Will ready court documents for scanning.

Credit: Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer Stephen Chapman: A chart mapping the hierarchy of Nazi officials for a medical project.

Credit: Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer Ed Moloy: All documents are reviewed with great care.

Credit: Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer Paul Deschner: Once scanned, the files are boxed and stored in Langdell Hall.

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