THE GOODS : In the Public’s Interest : Lawyer Ed Howard won’t cede the battle to reform the state’s insurance industry through Prop. 103. Nor will he stop tackling other issues that affect consumers’ lives.

Ed Howard “just sort of backed into” a career in consumer law. “I went to law school with the intent of trying to use my law degree for something beyond just making cash,” he says. “I was hopeful I could make a difference.”

It’s been only five years since he graduated from Loyola Law School, but Howard, at 31, is deep into the legal trenches of “making a difference.”

Not only does he represent California’s consumers as lead counsel in an ongoing stream of legal battles to fully implement Proposition 103, the 1988 insurance reform measure, he has branched out to other grass-roots areas such as sex equity in education, environmental issues and a successful fight to keep an affluent homeowner group from gating its community by blocking public streets.

These diverse issues share Howard’s litmus test for consumer advocacy: “The same rules should apply to everybody. Just because people have a lot of money and a lot of power to tie up something in the courts, they shouldn’t get away with breaking them.”

Howard’s ‘60s-style idealism is sincere, says Loyola law professor Karl Manheim, who was so impressed with Howard as a student that he hired him as a teaching and research assistant. “I don’t think I’ve had one person in both of those roles since then,” Manheim says. “Not only does Ed have good legal skills, he’s a good communicator and knows how to relate to people.

“Going into consumer law was a natural move for him--here’s a guy who thinks that government can work for ordinary people. It’s not just a view, it’s his marching orders. Ed is not an armchair advocate--he’s out there on the battlefield.”

Howard tends to discuss his work in terms of creativity rather than confrontation. Growing up in the San Fernando Valley (“I was in the uncool crowd that memorized Tom Lehrer records”), he planned a career in art until his senior year at Taft High School when he got involved in a student-run political organization called Junior State.

Planning mock state conventions and campaigns for office gave him his first taste of activism and he liked it. “I discovered that I got the same kind of satisfaction in being involved in policy than I got from art, only it was better,” he says. “In art you can only alter a facsimile of reality. In policy, or law, you can be directly creative and alter the way people live their lives. You can change the world you live in.”

As an undergraduate, he majored in political science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he was active in student body politics--which were “hard-core, tough, very competitive and a lot of fun.”

Before going to law school, he worked for a year as a property manager. “My mom thought I should get a background in business, but I didn’t like it.

“What I thought would make me happiest was getting into a situation where I could have a confluence of the things I liked about law and what I liked about policy.”

He is satisfied he has found that. Although Howard’s first job was with a large Downtown firm where he liked working on a big legal team, for the last four years he has been an associate with Hall & Associates in Westwood, one of the city’s few public interest law firms.

Hall & Associates is noted for such cases as the Friends of Mammoth decision, which made environmental rules and regulations applicable to private developers, and the Century Freeway litigation, which assured fair compensation for displaced homeowners. “I’m fortunate to be here,” Howard says. “There’s a real ethos that the attorneys should be involved in the community and all of us are involved in extracurricular activities that reflect our values.”

His white-painted corner office is sunny and spacious, lined with tidy banks of filing cabinets and filled with plants along with computers, books, a small television set and a radio tuned to classical music. A suite of comfortable couches and chairs fills one corner. “This office is bigger than most apartments I’ve lived in,” Howard says. “When I first moved in here, I felt like I was wearing my father’s clothes.”

The office includes personal items: a picture of his fiancee, actress Dina Brooks, and a wall of team pictures and banners paying homage to the Los Angeles Lakers. “I am a rabid, agonizing Laker fan,” declares Howard, who is mostly limited to watching and listening from afar, since he can’t afford season tickets. His other local passion--”triple chili-cheeseburger with no pickle and extra chili at Tommy’s on Beverly and Rampart”--is more affordable.

As a consumer advocate, Howard dips into a rich mix of experience. His Proposition 103 work has made him one of the state’s leading experts on the complex field of initiative law. Not only does he have experience writing regulations, he is skilled at courtroom litigation and at ease as a campaigner or conducting a news conference.

“My clients trust me to be a spokesperson for their causes when the press calls,” Howard says. “I’m very passionate about the work I’m doing.” He’s also an acknowledged workaholic who has spent so many hours at the computer that he wears an arm brace at work to ease muscle strain, and he uses a speaker telephone so he won’t have to hold the receiver.

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Howard has chalked up a string of successes and one major defeat, having thrown himself into last fall’s campaign for Proposition 186, the single-payer health care plan that voters rejected resoundingly in November. His experience with the Proposition 186 campaign typifies his passion for public policy reform. “It was just going to be one meeting, with some doctors, for a couple of hours,” he says of his first involvement. “But I was absolutely fascinated by the issue, and it was like the camel with its nose in the tent.”

From offering legal advice on the drafting, his role grew into organizer, coordinator and impassioned speaker on the circuit of fund-raising house parties.

“My life was madness for a while,” he says. “I had my regular job, I was also teaching a course at Loyola and I was speaking two or three evenings a week.”

He remains sold on the single-payer plan and, even in casual conversation, he jumps back on the soapbox. “I’m a fairly healthy person, but I was surprised at how dumb our current health care system is,” he says. “Not only do we have 5 million people in the state who are uninsured, for the rest of us the costs keep going up and the care keeps coming down.”

Howard says the Proposition 186 loss left him disappointed but not defeated. “We lost badly, but we saw it coming,” he says. “We got outspent about 10-to-1 by the insurance companies. It was my first hands-on experience in trying to slay a Goliath.”

With typical resilience, he has studied the defeat in terms of future strategies. He thinks Proposition 186 suffered from the media’s burnout on health care and the competition for voters’ interest with the controversial Proposition 187, which cuts government services to illegal immigrants.

“For a grass-roots ballot initiative to succeed in this immense state, everybody has to be focused on it and talking about it, and last fall, Proposition 187 was the focus,” he says. “I think it’s a real shame because we had an opportunity to provide better medical care that would give doctors their profession back.”

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In the meantime, Howard is still hammering away at implementing Proposition 103, the insurance reform measure passed by voters in the 1988 general election and immediately blocked in court by the insurance industry. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed.

“I think there is a widespread but mistaken belief that Proposition 103 hasn’t had an effect,” says Howard, who can tick off a succession of consumer victories: Rate rollbacks of $2.5 billion have been upheld by the state Supreme Court and about $1 billion has been paid; California has moved from being near the top among states in rate increases to the bottom of the list (a reversal that has saved California consumers about $4 billion); insurance companies can’t cancel or refuse to renew policies with no reason, and the state now has an elected insurance commissioner.

Harvey Rosenfield, author of Proposition 103, praises Howard’s work as a “remarkable example of how somebody with a tremendous amount of drive, intelligence and determination can have a profound effect on society.”

Adds Rosenfield: “The insurance industry has spent six years and somewhere between $150 million and $200 million on legal challenges designed to delay or derail Proposition 103. Ed Howard and a handful of other lawyers working with him have defeated the industry at every juncture.

“This is how the civil justice system is supposed to work in our country.”

Howard says the experience with a losing Proposition 186 and the struggle to implement Proposition 103 have reinforced his conviction that the world needs consumer lawyers, working along with other activists to bring about social change.

“What I think about every morning when I go to work is not merely insurance reform, but that the fight to implement 103 is a fight to safeguard bedrock democratic principles.”

He repeats the theme that keeps recurring in any conversation about his work: “When we vote for something, it ought to become law.”