Angela Wu Howard

Angela Wu Howard is the Senior Law Fellow at Becket.

Angela obtained a doctorate in legal theory from Oxford, England and a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. While at Harvard, she edited the Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Law Review and the Harvard Human Rights Journal, ran the Battered Women’s Advocacy Project, and worked for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division Appellate Section. Angela was a Fulbright Fellow in Brussels, Belgium, where she obtained a D.E.S. in European Law from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her B.A. is from Northwestern University, where she graduated with honors in Modern Intellectual History for a thesis on memory, violence, and language in Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Angela clerked in the federal circuit courts of appeal for the Honorable William W Schwarzer in San Francisco, worked for Oxfam America in Boston, and served as a negotiations consultant on civil society issues to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. She was litigating hostile corporate takeovers and political asylum cases with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in New York when Becket called.

In over two decades at Becket, Angela served as Executive Director, Legal Counsel, and International Law Director. Her cases have involved a constitutional challenge to a blasphemy law in Indonesia, anti-conversion law in Malaysia, anti-proselytism law in India, bans on religious symbols in Turkey and France, and zoning restrictions in Azerbaijan, as well as clients from Buddhists to Christians to Muslims stateside. She has also served on the governing Bureau of the United Nations NGO Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief.

Angela speaks English fluently and French, Mandarin Chinese, and Taiwanese to varying degrees of competency. She enjoys dictionaries, design, and Charlotte Mason homeschooling.