At the Bureau, Kennedy quickly assumed a leadership position, being elected to the clinic’s board as the outreach director. When Hartigan and fellow Bureau member David E. Haller ’03 decided to start a special foreclosure task force in 2008, they looked to Kennedy to help facilitate the launch of the unprecedented initiative which would add even more work to the already over-burdened Bureau staff.

“The first person that I went to when we were trying to do this was Joe. I knew that Joe was the type of person who would work his butt off,” Hartigan says. “It was the kind of thing where if we had him on our side we had a lot better shot.”

With Kennedy’s help, Hartigan and Haller aimed to visit every foreclosed property in Boston, bringing on more clients than the Bureau had dealt with before.

The initiative, No One Leaves, found most of its cases in Dorchester and South Boston where owners of triple-decker homes often rent out upstairs apartments. As the financial and housing crises swept across the country, more and more of these homeowners slipped into foreclosure, and renters were left in the cold—at which point Hartigan, Kennedy, and other staffers would arrive.

Even without the extra work of task forces like No One Leaves, HLAB is intense. If accepted, students must commit to two years of service. Officially, members will work about 20 hours a week, says Boston lawyer Elizabeth Nessen, Kennedy’s former advisor at the Bureau. But according to former bureau members, 20 hours is the bare minimum, and most students would often push 30- or 40-hour weeks.

“I spent every day with Joe...from the minute the sun rose to after it set. The bureau is a really insane time commitment,” says one of Kennedy’s Law School classmates, who requested to remain anonymous as her job prohibits her from speaking with the media.

As one of the few fluent Spanish speakers at HLAB, Kennedy was always on call. Hartigan and others would often summon him from class to translate, and Kennedy, dropping everything, would get in his pick-up truck and drive wherever he was needed.

The overflow of work at the Bureau made keeping up with classes and other activities a battle.

“I think the word balance is just a level of control that we probably didn’t have,” Hartigan explains with a laugh. “It’s a lot of triage.”

But HLAB was not the only claim on Kennedy’s time. He also served as the technical editor for The Harvard Human Rights Journal, responsible for checking references and citations for each article before it was printed. In the spring of 2007, Kennedy co-cooridanated the journal’s 20th anniversary conference.

Off-campus, Kennedy helped found an after-school education and outreach program in Jamaica Plain with his future fiancée and fellow HLS student Lauren A. Birchfield. And during the lead up to the 2008 presidential election, he traveled the country as a translator for his uncle Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56, who was campaigning on behalf of then-Senator Barack Obama.

In the classroom, Kennedy was a solid student, former classmates said, though worn a little thin by his extra-curricular activities. During his three years at the Law School, he twice took courses taught by Law School professor and current U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, and worked closely with Professor Lucie E. White on human rights and poverty issues.

A FAMILY LEGACY

Kennedy’s enrollment in Harvard Law School in 2006 was in more than one way a return home. When his parents, Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II and Sheila Brewster Rauch, divorced in 1991, Kennedy came to live exclusively in Cambridge; until that point he had split his time between Cambridge and Kennedy property in Hyannis, Mass.

With his twin brother Matthew R. Kennedy, Kennedy attended Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols, a private preparatory school in Cambridge, and then Stanford. After graduating, Kennedy spent two years in the Dominican Republic as a Peace Corps volunteer—a watershed experience he has often pointed to as a candidate.