Philip K. Howard, partner at Covington & Burling, is the best-selling author of The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America (Random House 1995) and The Collapse of the Common Good: How America’s Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom (Ballantine 2002) - originally issued as The Lost Art of Drawing the Line (Random House 2001). He is a periodic contributor to the op-ed pages of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and speaks before judicial, government, and professional organizations around the country. In the Oxford Companion To American Law, Howard contributed the section on American law since 1968.

Howard is Chairman of Common Good, organized to overhaul our lawsuit culture and restore Americans’ freedom to use their common sense. Other members of the bipartisan coalition include former Senators Howard Baker, Bill Bradley, George McGovern, and Alan Simpson, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, former Atty General Richard Thornburgh and Deputy Atty General Eric Holder, and leaders in education, health care, business and public policy.

Howard has advised leaders of both parties on reform initiatives. He was special advisor to the Securities and Exchange Commission on regulatory simplification, worked on environmental and management reforms with Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government program, advised the Republican leadership on regulatory reform, and worked on overhauling civil service and other bureaucratic institutions with several governors, including Zell Miller in Georgia, Bill Weld in Massachusetts and Jeb Bush and Lawton Chiles in Florida.

Howard is also a prominent civic leader in New York. Most recently, Howard is Chairman of a committee which installed the “Tribute in Light” interim memorial for the World Trade Center tragedy. As a young lawyer, he was chairman of zoning of a Manhattan Community Board, where he led a fight to block developer Harry Helmsley from destroying several parks near the United Nations. He was named one of “New York’s Heroes” by The Village Voice for his leadership in blocking a building that would have cast a shadow across Central Park. Howard is currently Chairman of the Municipal Art Society, where he worked with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Brendan Gill and others to save and restore Grand Central Terminal and other landmarks.

Howard grew up in small towns in the south, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He was a scholarship student at Taft School, Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School. Howard lives in Manhattan with his wife and four children.

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