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Spring 2006

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The Evolution of a Lawyer
Steve Harvey ’82 fights against teaching intelligent design in public schools

—Bill Carey




	photo by Forrest MacCormick

FOR SIX WEEKS AT THE end of last year, Steve Harvey ’82 waged a battle of words and ideas of the highest profundity—over science and religion, church and state, truth and deception—and came away a winner.

Harvey served as co-lead counsel representing plaintiffs in the landmark Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District case in Pennsylvania, the first case to test whether intelligent design can be taught in a public school science class. On Dec. 20, 2005, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled decisively for the plaintiffs that intelligent design is a religious belief, and that promoting it in a classroom violates the First Amendment.

The trial drew national attention and launched Harvey and partner Eric Rothschild on a lecture circuit taking in bar associations, the National Academy of Sciences, even the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, in the belly of the beast where intelligent design has been advanced by the state Board of Education.

“How exciting is that?” asked Harvey, amazed. A Republican and a regular churchgoer, Harvey, 45, is not exactly a “devout” Catholic as one writer described him. He acknowledges being “a little bit of a dissenter” with the church. Before taking the Dover case, he thought about the biblical undercurrent of intelligent design and how it meshed with Catholicism. He did not hesitate to oppose it.

“My religion doesn’t take a literal reading of [the Bible]. We believe that it contains religious truth, but not in a literal sense,” he said. “So there is no conflict. I came to grips with that early on.”

Intelligent design (ID) is based on natural theology, the idea that there is design in nature, and that that design is proof of the existence of God, Harvey explained.

“That goes back to the Greeks, and certainly Thomas Aquinas had that same view, and I happen to believe in that,” he said. “When I see a beautiful sunset, but more importantly, when I see the love of a small child, or human love, or so many other things that we experience, those, to me, are not purely explainable by a bunch of chemicals and mathematical equations. They are proof of the existence of God, but I don’t believe that as a scientific matter, I believe that as a religious matter or a philosophical matter.”

Harvey sees a continuum that brought him to this place, beginning with two constitutional law courses he took with UMass Amherst Professor Sheldon Goldman, including one on civil liberties—exactly the area of the Dover case. An Irish Catholic product of blue-collar Pittsfield, Harvey majored in political science at UMass Amherst, then earned his law degree from Villanova University in 1989.

Twenty-four years removed from his bandana-wearing days in Amherst, Harvey has been refined by his years at the Department of Justice, where he defended the government, and as a litigator in the high-stakes, button-down world of corporate law. Today he is a partner with Pepper Hamilton LLP in Philadelphia, and he and his wife, Mimi, have two children: Jack, 3, and Paige, 2.

The Dover case fell into Rothschild’s lap. He had served on the legal advisory committee of the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland-based nonprofit that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools. The center and the American Civil Liberties Union in Pennsylvania had been hearing from concerned parents in Dover, a small borough southwest of Harrisburg, about an October 2004 school board dictum. The board had decreed that ninth-grade biology students be advised of alternatives to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, namely ID. The two organizations reached out to www.pepperlaw.com/careers/office_philadelphia.cfm Pepper Hamilton, which took on the case pro bono.

Rothschild and Harvey had worked together before on science-related vaccine and products cases. They also are friends. “Once we had teamed up with the ACLU, Steve was the first member of the team I tried to recruit,” Rothschild recalled. “He has a strong intellectual bent and is a very good trial lawyer. He has the sort of intellectual inquisitiveness that this case required.”

Inquisitiveness is one way of putting it. In conversations he cares about, Harvey is engaged and often intense. He has close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, steely pupils, and a penetrating stare that forces even the shy or uncooperative to respond. He’ll debate until the cows come home but occasionally breaks it up with a mischievous aside, revealing a leprechaun’s sense of humor.

“Steve is a very intense lawyer,” said Tammy Kitzmiller, the Dover parent whose name will forever be associated with the battle over ID. “I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be on the wrong side.”

Pepper Hamilton and the ACLU www.aclu.org assembled a legal strike force to engage the Dover Area School District board members who were pushing a four-paragraph challenge to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Rothschild, Harvey, and Witold “Vic” Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania ACLU, were the main courtroom players, but they had many coaches and assistants, including the National Center for Science Education, www.natcenscied.org which provided the lawyers with a crash course in intelligent design, creationism, and evolution.

Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a not-for-profit organization “dedicated to the defense and promotion of the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life,” represented the defendant school board members. Playing a supporting role was the Discovery Institute, www.discovery.org a Seattle think tank that defends ID.

Rothschild merited a full-page caricature in The New Yorker magazine for his “cheerful mercilessness” in cross-examining Lehigh University biochemist Michael J. Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box and leading light of the ID movement. Observers of the grueling, six-week trial also remember a vivid moment when Harvey cross-examined William Buckingham, chairman of the Dover school board’s curriculum committee.

Harvey had deposed Buckingham in January 2005, but had failed to wring from him the source of an $850 donation used to purchase copies of the creationist tract, Of Pandas and People, provided to students as an alternative textbook. The lawyers later learned that Buckingham had raised the money at his church, then cut a check to the father of the school board chairman to buy the books.

“Mr. Buckingham, you lied to me at your deposition on Jan. 3rd, 2005. Isn’t that true,” said Harvey, according to a court transcript. “How so?” Buckingham replied. “By not telling me, when I asked you, that a collection had been taken at your church for the book Of Pandas and People.”

Buckingham persisted. “I did not take a collection,” he said. Countered Harvey, “Well, you wrote the check [to pay for the books] didn’t you?” At that, Buckingham relented. “Yes, I did.”
“It was like, ‘You were lying to me. How could you do that?’ He looked like he was so hurt,” remembered reporter Laurie Lebo, who covered the trial for the Pennsylvania Daily Record.

Lebo vividly re-created the scene when the trial ended. Outside the courthouse, she said, “The scientists are there, and the plaintiffs are there, and then, of course, Steve and Eric and Vic are having their moment in the sun. And I just stepped back and I watched and I said to myself, ‘you know, something really important happened here.’”

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