Philip K. Howard

Chair, Common Good
Vice-Chairman, Covington & Burling

Philip K. Howard chairs Common Good and is a well-known leader of legal reform in America. Common Good is a national bipartisan coalition organized to restore common sense to American law. Its proposals include special health courts for reliable medical justice.

Howard founded Common Good in 2002. Its Advisory Board of Common Law includes former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, former Sens. George McGovern and Alan Simpson and former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean. Howard also serves as vice-chairman of the New York law firm Covington & Burling.

Howard is the author of The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America (Random House 1995) and The Collapse of 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, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, and speaks before judicial, government and professional organizations around the country. He was special advisor to the Securities and Exchange Commission on regulatory simplification, worked on environmental and management reforms with former 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 a member of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations' Tort Resolution and Injury Prevention Roundtable.

As a civic leader in New York, Howard chairs of the Municipal Art Society and chaired the committee which installed the "Tribute in Light" interim memorial for the World Trade Center tragedy.

Howard earned his law degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville where he was a member of the Order of the Coif and a member of the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review. He received his bachelor's degree from Yale College in New Haven, Conn.