Philip K. Howard

Philip K. Howard, is the 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). 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. He is the Vice-Chairman of Covington & Burling and a prominent civic leader in New York.

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 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.