Philip K Howard | Legal Reformer Sets His Sights On Public Sector Collective Bargaining

Mar 1 2022 • 48 mins

Philip K. Howard is a longtime leader of government and legal reform in the United States. Amid the current political turmoil, Howard has set his sights on the remorseless increase in the power of public employee unions. This is a thread linking public sector pension shortfalls; local, state, and federal government bureaucratic dysfunction; outdated public infrastructure that costs far more to improve than in comparable nations; and the struggles between parents and teachers’ unions on issues from student masking to curriculum development.

Howard’s guiding star is to hold government accountable to the citizens it is intended to serve.

In this episode of the Serve to Lead Podcast, Howard discusses his efforts to reform public sector collective bargaining—including an innovative project to challenge its constitutionality. He also explores the evolution of the legal profession, including the decline of the lawyer-statesman ideal.

Philip K. Howard’s latest book is Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left (W.W. Norton & Company, January 2019). His 2010 Ted Talk has been viewed over 650,000 times.

Howard is also the author of the best-seller The Death of Common Sense (Random House, 1995), The Collapse of the Common Good(Ballantine Books, 2002), Life Without Lawyers(W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), and The Rule of Nobody (W.W. Norton & Company, 2014). He writes periodically for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other publications.

In 2002, Howard founded Common Good, a nonpartisan national coalition dedicated to restoring common sense to America. His 2015 report “Two Years, Not Ten Years” delineated the economic and environmental costs of delayed infrastructure approvals, and has been endorsed by leaders of both major political parties.

The son of a minister, Philip K. Howard got his start working summers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner and has been active in public affairs his entire adult life. He is a prominent civic leader in New York City and has advised national political leaders on legal and regulatory reform for three decades, including Vice President Al Gore and numerous governors. He is Senior Counsel at the law firm Covington & Burling, LLP. Howard is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School, and lives in Manhattan with his wife Alexandra. They have four children.

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