Source: Washington Post
by George F Will
“Philip K. Howard, a graduate of Taft prep school, Yale and the University of Virginia School of Law, says he never wore ‘white bucks.’ This 1950s campus fashion waned before he matriculated. Those buckskin shoes were popular among young blades destined to become ‘white-shoe lawyers’ at prestigious ‘white-shoe law firms,’ such as Covington & Burling, where Howard, 76, is senior counsel. He also is a genteel inveigher against the coagulation of American society, which is saturated with law. … When all choices by people in authority are, in Howard’s words, ‘strained through a legal sieve,’ we understand Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning from nearly 200 years ago: Minute regulations that stifle intuition, judgment and freedom perpetuate ‘a drowsy regularity,’ and the status quo.” (10/01/25)