Advisory Board

Susan Butler Plum

Susan Butler Plum is the founding director of the Skadden Fellowship Foundation, which awards two-year grants to 25 public interest attorneys a year. The Foundation was established in April of 1988 and has made grants to over 591 attorneys who provide civil legal services to the poor.

Prior to joining Skadden, Butler Plum was the director of the Botwinick-Wolfensohn Foundation and program director of the Booth Ferris Foundation. She was also the associate director for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Among her board affiliations are trusteeships of Turnaround for Children and of Peer Health Exchange. She is also a member of the selection committee of the Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellowship, the advisory board of The Kathryn A. McDonald Education Advocacy Project at The Legal Aid Society of New York City, the advisory board of A Better Balance, the Morris Dees Award selection committee, the international advisory council of the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative and the Harvard Law School Venture Fund Advisory Group.

Alan Khazei '87

Alan Khazei has pioneered ways to empower citizens to make a difference. In 1987, as a young graduate from Harvard Law School, he turned down lucrative offers from corporate law firms to co-found a nonprofit organization called City Year with his friend, Michael Brown. City Year unites young adults ages 17-24 from all backgrounds for an intensive year of full-time community service mentoring, tutoring, and educating children. It served as the model and inspiration for President Clinton’s AmeriCorps program and now operates in 20 U.S. cities and Johannesburg and London.

In June 2003, when AmeriCorps faced a drastic funding cut, Khazei joined with other service leaders to organize the “Save AmeriCorps” coalition, an effort that saved the program and led to an increase in funding of $100 million dollars. Inspired by the success of the Save AmeriCorps campaign, in 2007, he launched Be the Change, Inc., a nonprofit that creates national issue based campaigns by organizing coalitions of non-profits, social entrepreneurs, policymakers, private sector leaders, academics, and citizens. In 2009, ServiceNation, the first campaign to be launched from this platform, played a key role in the enactment of the strongly bi-partisan Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act.

In the fall of 2009, Khazei was a democratic candidate in the Senate special election primary in Massachusetts. He was endorsed by the state’s leading newspaper—the Boston Globe, as well as the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, CapeCod Times, West Roxbury Transcript and Blue Mass Group. He also received endorsements from public leaders such as General Wesley Clark, Mayor Bloomberg, and Senators Hart, Nunn, and Wofford. Jonathan Alter in a Newsweek column entitled “Teddy’s Rightful Heir” described Khazei as being the only candidate “carrying forward his reform ideas on the most important domestic issue of the 21st century”.

Khazei has served on the boards of leading national non-profits and has received numerous awards, including the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Jefferson Award for Public Service, and the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award. In 2006, US News and World Report named him one of America's “25 Best Leaders.” He is an honors graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is also the author of the upcoming book, Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism can Bring Out The Best In America. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife, Vanessa Kirsch, and their two children.

Rebecca Onie '03

Rebecca Onie is a public health entrepreneur building a low-cost, replicable model that melds the aspirations of college students and the unmet needs of health care institutions to address the link between poverty and poor health. Health Leads (formerly Project HEALTH), which she co-founded while a college sophomore, is designed to overcome the barriers for low-income families to good health outcomes that are often the result of apparently unrelated constraints, such as child care, transportation, housing, food, education, and legal advocacy. Onie recognized that health care providers are neither trained to diagnose nor have the tools to address the socioeconomic ills that contribute to poor health. Committed to a concept of a health care system that systematically addresses all patient needs, she created a program that works in concert with hospitals and physician mentors to mobilize college students to assist patients in overcoming obstacles limiting their access to health care. By deploying college students to Family Health Desks in clinics throughout the country, Health Leads enables these clinics to establish new protocols for routinely screening and addressing patients’ unmet resource needs. Equally important, by providing volunteers with direct experience of the relationship between health and poverty, the program has created a generation of young people committed to improving health care delivery in their future careers. Founded on one campus in one city, Health Leads now has hundreds of volunteers helping thousands of families each year at pediatric sites in Boston, Providence, New York, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Chicago. Continually refining the Health Leads model for new challenges and local conditions, Onie is providing health care professionals with effective tools for alleviating the socioeconomic barriers that limit access to health care for low-income families, thereby expanding the scope of what health care truly entails.

With Dr. Barry Zuckerman, Onie co-founded Project HEALTH, now called Health Leads, in 1996 and served as executive director until 1999. After attending law school, she was an associate at Miner, Barnhill, and Galland P.C. from 2003 to 2005, before returning to Health Leads as CEO in 2006. To read more about Health Leads, click here.

Read more about Rebecca here: A Prescription for Change

Paul Rosenberg '79

Paul Rosenberg is a partner in the Bridgespan Group's Boston office. At Bridgespan, he leads teams developing strategies for organizations focusing on education, public health, and disadvantaged populations, with a particular focus on advocacy and the intersection of the nonprofit and government sectors. He has worked with education advocacy groups, intermediaries focused on school improvement, school support organizations, and the Council of Chief State School Officers. He joined Bridgespan after 12 years at Bain & Company, where he was a partner focused primarily on health care. He worked on issues of strategy, organization, and operations for companies in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, biotechnology, health insurers, and providers. While at Bain, he also led the firm's pro-bono partnership with Charlestown (Boston) High School for nine years.

Rosenberg co-authored Bain's work on "Innovation Imbalance," which was featured at the World Economics Forum's Healthcare Board of Governors in Davos in 2004, and was published in The Economist and In Vivo, among others. He also led a team exploring the public policy implications of Canadian drug regulatory and pricing policies, which was broadly presented in Canada in 2004. Prior to Bain, Rosenberg served as special counsel to the United States Department of State, where he oversaw a review of all assistance programs to the countries of the former Soviet Union. From 1993 to 1996, he served as senior adviser to Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown, coordinating all international trade issues for the secretary. He also managed the 1984 US Senate campaign of then-Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor John F. Kerry. He entered government and campaign service from McKinsey & Company, where he was an associate and then engagement manager.

In addition, Rosenberg has been a senior executive and partner in two Massachusetts companies: Grand Circle Travel, a direct marketer of travel and financial services to Americans over 60, and Kensington Investment Company, which acquired and managed office buildings in the Boston area. He is currently a member of the Advisory Committee of the MAPS Adoption and Humanitarian Aid Organization. He was on the Board of Directors of the Germaine Lawrence School, a residential facility for troubled adolescents, and was formerly on the Board of Advisers of the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School. He also is currently a member of the Dean's Advisory Board of the Boston University School of Public Health and a member of the Board of Advisers of the Harvard Law School Public Service Venture Fund.

Rosenberg is a graduate of Harvard College (AB, magna cum laude), Harvard Law School (J.D.), and Harvard Business School (MBA, with distinction), and is a member of the Massachusetts and Federal bars. He and his wife Sarah have three children and live in West Newton, MA.

Kenneth Zimmerman '88

Kenneth Zimmerman is a member of the Lowenstein Sandler Litigation Group. A noted civil rights attorney, Zimmerman's practice focuses on the strategic direction and implementation of the firm's pro bono and public advocacy initiatives. He recently served as a member of the Presidential Transition Team preparing the new Administration's activities related to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and served a four-month stint as a senior advisor to Secretary Donovan following the inauguration. He also has an appointment as a senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute's Metropolitan Policy Program and serves as advisor to Harvard Law School's new Public Service Venture Fund, which provides seed money for start-up non-profit ventures and salary support to graduating law students pursuing post-graduate work at nonprofits or government agencies.

Prior to joining Lowenstein Sandler, Zimmerman served as chief counsel to New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine (2006-2008), where he and his staff were responsible for legislative matters, judicial and prosecutorial appointments, and the oversight of the state’s many independent commissions and authorities. During his tenure, the state undertook initiatives to reduce and reform property taxes, upgrade ethics requirements, combat crime, and reform the state's school funding system. Zimmerman was the founding executive director of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, a Newark-based urban advocacy and research organization. Under his leadership (1999-2006), the Institute initiated a model program to assist urban high school graduates enter the building trades, which resulted in a multi-million dollar commitment from the state to replicate the program; co-authored reports on predatory lending and driver's license suspension that led to legislative changes in New Jersey; litigated affordable housing and fair lending cases; and spearheaded nationally recognized efforts to reform the state's corrections and parole systems.

Zimmerman also served as the deputy assistant secretary for Enforcement and Programs in the Office of Fair Housing in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington D.C.; he was the third-ranking official in HUD's 600-person civil rights office and directed HUD's enforcement efforts under the Fair Housing Act and other civil rights laws. Earlier in his career, he worked at the U.S. Department of Justice as a senior trial attorney and trial attorney for the Civil Rights Division (Housing and Civil Enforcement Section), where he litigated affirmative civil rights cases nationwide that challenged discrimination in housing, lending and public accommodations.

Zimmerman has held various teaching and fellowship positions including Wasserstein public interest fellow, Harvard Law School; adjunct professor, American University Washington College of Law; instructor, United States Attorney General’s Advocacy Institute, and Ferguson human rights and development fellow in India. He also taught at Sherut La'am in Israel and at the Upward Bound Program in New Haven, Connecticut.

Alan Jenkins '89

Alan Jenkins is executive director of The Opportunity Agenda, a communications, research, and policy organization dedicated to building the national will to expand opportunity for all. Before joining The Opportunity Agenda, Jenkins was director of human rights at the Ford Foundation, managing over $50 million in grant making annually in the United States and eleven overseas regions. Previously, he served as assistant to the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he represented the United States government in constitutional and other litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to that, he was associate counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where he defended the rights of low-income communities suffering from exploitation and discrimination.

His other positions have included assistant adjunct professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Carter, and coordinator of the Access to Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Jenkins serves on the Board of Trustees of the Center for Community Change, the Board of Governors of the New School University, and is a co-chair of the American Constitution Society's Project on the Constitution in the Twenty-First Century. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in Media Studies from New School University, and a B.A. in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard College.

Josh Bedell ’07

Josh Bedell is in the investment banking division at Goldman Sachs. He was born in an orphanage in South Korea and adopted into an Italian family at eight months of age. Bedell grew up in central Massachusetts in a small town called Grafton, which literally had no stoplights. He aspired to join the military and was an Army ROTC scholarship cadet at Georgetown University before a car accident prematurely ended that aspect of his service career. 

After graduating with a finance degree, Bedell began his career in the Mergers & Acquisitions department at Merrill Lynch. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 2007. Since then, Bedell has worked in the Investment Banking Division at Goldman Sachs. 

In his free time, he enjoys running, music (he has seen Pearl Jam in concert over 25 times, beginning in 1994), socializing with friends, and reading.

Martha Minow

Martha Minow, the dean and Jeremiah Smith, Jr. professor of law, has taught at Harvard Law School since 1981, where her courses have included civil procedure, constitutional law, family law, international criminal justice, jurisprudence, law and education, nonprofit organizations, and the public law workshop. An expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities, she also writes and teaches about privatization, military justice, and ethnic and religious conflict.

Besides her many scholarly articles published in journals of law, history, and philosophy, her books include: In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark (2010); Government by Contract (co-edited, 2009); Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference (co-edited, 2008); Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law and Repair (edited by Nancy Rosenblum with commentary by other authors, 2003); Partners, Not Rivals: Privatization and the Public Good (2002); Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies (co-edited 2002); Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998); Not Only for Myself: Identity, Politics and Law (1997); Law Stories (co-edited 1996); Narrative, Violence and the Law: The Essays of Robert M. Cover (co-edited 1992); and Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (1990). She is the co-editor of two law school casebooks, Civil Procedure: Doctrine, Practice and Context (3rd. edition 2008) and Women and the Law (4th edition 2007), and a reader, Family Matters: Readings in Family Lives and the Law (1993).

She served on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo and helped to launch Imagine Coexistence, a program of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, to promote peaceful development in post-conflict societies. Her five-year partnership with the federal Department of Education and the Center for Applied Special Technology worked to increase access to the curriculum for students with disabilities and resulted in both legislative initiatives and a voluntary national standard opening access to curricular materials for individuals with disabilities. She currently works on the Divided Cities initiative which is building an alliance of global cities dealing with ethnic, religious, or political divisions. Her honors include: the Sacks-Freund Teaching Award, selected by the Harvard Law School graduating class of 2005, the Holocaust Center Award, 2006, an Honorary Doctorate of Law, University of Toronto, 2006 and an Honorary Doctorate of Education, Wheelock College, 1996.

In August 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Dean Minow to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, a bipartisan, government-sponsored organization that provides civil legal assistance to low-income Americans. The U.S. Senate confirmed her appointment on March 19, 2010. She chairs the board of directors for the Revson Foundation (New York) and serves on the boards of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Covenant Foundation (New York and Chicago), and Facing History and Ourselves. She is a former member of the board of the Iranian Human Rights Documentation Center. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1992, Minow has also been a senior fellow of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, a member of Harvard University Press Board of Syndics, a senior fellow and twice acting director of what is now Harvard’s Safra Foundation Center on Ethics, and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She has delivered more than 70 named or endowed lectures and keynote addresses. Minow co-chaired the Law School’s curricular reform committee from 2003 to 2006, an effort that led to significant innovation in the first-year curriculum as well as new programs of study for second- and third-year J.D. students.

After completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, Minow received a master’s degree in education from Harvard and her law degree from Yale. She clerked for Judge David Bazelon of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court of the United States. She joined the Harvard Law faculty as an assistant professor in 1981, was promoted to professor in 1986, was named the William Henry Bloomberg professor of law in 2003, and became the Jeremiah Smith Jr., professor of law in 2005. She is also a lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She enjoys watching and talking about movies and keeping in touch with current and former students.

Josh Rubenstein '06

Josh Rubenstein is assistant dean and chief admissions officer at Harvard Law School. Known on most law school discussion boards simply as “JR,” Rubenstein attended Washington University in St. Louis as an undergrad (graduating in 2001) and then worked as senior staff assistant for U.S. House of Representatives Democratic minority leader Richard Gephardt before entering Harvard Law School in 2003.

After law school, Rubenstein worked as a case team leader with the global business and strategy consulting firm Bain & Company before returning to the Law School in 2009 as its assistant dean and chief admissions officer. Rubenstein also serves on the board of directors of Education Pioneers and on the Truman Scholarship Finalist Selection Committee.

Carol Steiker '86

Carol Steiker is the Howard and Kathy Aibel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her primary interest is the broad field of criminal justice, where her work ranges from substantive criminal law to criminal procedure to institutional design, with a special focus on issues related to capital punishment. Steiker served on the board of editors of the Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice (2nd ed. Macmillan, 2002), she is the editor of Criminal Procedure Stories (Foundation 2006), and she is co-author of the Kadish, Schulhofer & Steiker casebook, Criminal Law and Its Processes (8th ed. Aspen 2007). Recent publications address topics such as the relationship of criminal justice scholarship to law reform, the role of mercy in the institutions of criminal justice, and the likelihood of nationwide abolition of capital punishment. Courses taught by Steiker have included Criminal Law, Advanced Criminal Procedure (both Investigation and Adjudication), Capital Punishment in America, Thinking About Law Teaching (with Professor Todd Rakoff), Criminal Justice Workshop (with Assistant Professor Adriaan Lanni), and Justice and Mercy in Jewish and Christian Tradition and American Criminal Law (with Professor Sarah Coakley of the Harvard Divinity School). Steiker has offered reading groups on Criminal Justice Theory (upper-level) and Voices From Inside the Criminal Justice System (1L).

Steiker is a graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges and Harvard Law School, where she served as president of the Harvard Law Review, the second woman to hold that position in its then 99-year history. After clerking for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, she worked as a staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she represented indigent defendants at all stages of the criminal process. She has been a member of the Harvard Law School faculty since 1992, where she was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 1998-2001 and where she currently serves as the Dean's Special Advisor for Public Service and as a first-year Section Leader. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University. In addition to her scholarly work, Steiker has worked on pro bono litigation projects on behalf of indigent criminal defendants, including death penalty cases in the United States Supreme Court. She has also served as a consultant and an expert witness on issues of criminal justice for non-profit organizations and has testified before Congress and the Massachusetts legislature. 

Brett Messing '89

Brett Messing is a senior advisor to Los Angeles mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and chief operating officer of the Office of Business and Economic Policy. He is also serving as the Terence M. Considine visiting senior research fellow in law, economics and business at Harvard Law School. He was previously managing partner and founder of GPS Partners, a two billion dollar energy focused hedge fund.

Before founding GPS Partners, Messing was a managing director at Lehman Brothers. He began his career at Goldman Sachs where he was a vice president and head of the Restricted Equities Group. He is a graduate of Brown University (1986) and Harvard Law School (1989).

Earl Martin Phalen '93

Earl Martin Phalen is the CEO of Reach Out and Read (www.reachoutandread.org) and Summer Advantage USA (www.summeradvantage.org). Reach Out and Read promotes early literacy skill development of nearly 4 million children ages 0-5, and Summer Advantage USA ensures the academic and social development of school-aged children, ages 5-14. Previously, he was the CEO of Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL), a national nonprofit organization he cofounded in 1992. He is a recipient of The Mind Trust and Ashoka fellowships.

Phalen served on the education policy group for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and as co-chair of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's education task force. President Bill Clinton named him as a recipient of the President's Service Award in 1997. Phalen received his undergraduate degree from Yale University (1989) and his J.D. from Harvard Law School (1993).

Alexa Shabecoff

Alexa Shabecoff is assistant dean for Public Service and director of the Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising (OPIA) at HLS. OPIA was the first office of its kind in the nation, dedicated to advising Harvard Law School students and alumni/ae about public service careers. Shabecoff began her affiliation with OPIA as a Wasserstein Fellow-in-Residence during the fall of 1993 before joining OPIA as a member of its staff.

During her time with OPIA, the number of students pursuing public service work over the summer has grown to 390 this past summer and the percentage of students pursuing postgraduate public service work upon graduation or after a clerkship has grown to 10 to 12%. Shabecoff has received several awards for her work, including the 2004 Suzanne L. Richardson Staff Appreciation Award, awarded by the graduating class to one staff member.

Before joining OPIA, Shabecoff spent approximately eight years as a legal services lawyer in both Missouri and Massachusetts. She is a 1986 graduate of NYU School of Law where she was a Root Tilden Scholar and a vice president of the Public Interest Law Foundation. Prior to law school, she worked as a paralegal for the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund of Kentucky. Shabecoff is a 1999 graduate of "Lead Boston," a community leadership and diversity-training program of the National Conference for Community and Justice.