Michael Howland-Dewar, 2L, is a 2025 recipient of a Peggy Browning Fellowship, a prestigious program that provides law students with hands-on experience in labor and workplace justice advocacy.
He spent his summer in Chicago with the Chicago News Guild (TNG-CWA Local 34071) and its outside counsel, Katz, Friedman, Eisenstein, Johnson, Bareck & Bertuca, where he worked on matters advancing the rights of organized workers.
Each year, the Peggy Browning Fund selects a competitive cohort from among thousands of applicants, placing fellows with labor unions, worker advocacy organizations, and law firms representing labor interests.
“I came to Temple with the explicit and exclusive goal of becoming a union-side labor attorney,” Howland-Dewar said. “That was informed by my political background, but primarily by my experience in working in unionized and non-unionized workplaces. I was able to see the union difference.”
Born and raised in southern Connecticut, Howland-Dewar studied history at the University of Chicago, where his commitment to labor and political organizing began. He took a year off to work on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and, after graduation, returned to campaign work across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. In 2020, he rejoined the Sanders campaign in New Hampshire as a proud member of UFCW Local 400.
Beyond campaign politics, he has continued to support labor organizing efforts—serving as a union-side election observer for graduate student unionization at UChicago and joining UNITE HERE picket lines in Philadelphia.
Howland-Dewar credited his Temple Law coursework with providing a strong legal foundation that he applied during his fellowship.
“While I hadn’t had a chance to take labor and employment-specific courses—I did this fellowship my 1L summer—I was able to take the methods I was taught in my 1L doctrinal classes to quickly pick up the relevant legal issues,” he said. “And I can’t state enough how much my Legal Research and Writing course prepared me to write effective, focused briefs for my supervisors.”
Reflecting on the experience, he added:
“A Peggy Browning Fellowship is a great opportunity to get essential experience doing labor law; it’s the first step many take on their career to becoming labor lawyers.”
For Howland-Dewar, pursuing labor law is fundamentally about the clients he serves.
“I see choosing to be a union-side labor attorney more as a choice of client than as a choice of specialty. While there is a lot of detailed administrative law involved, I most appreciated (and am most excited by) the sheer variety of topics that come up in the course of representing organized workers.”
Looking ahead, Howland-Dewar has already secured a second Peggy Browning Fellowship with the International Office of the Communications Workers of America for summer 2026.