Phil White || Lake George, New York

Attorney & Social Justice Advocate

I am thrilled and grateful for the opportunity to journey with this class. During the 2019-20 academic year, I was a Fellow in the Inspired Leadership Initiative at Notre Dame. My work in that program not only turned me into a Notre Dame fan, but also helped me to engineer a major pivot from a career as an international infrastructure lawyer to a social justice activist. Although I arrived wanting to change, I could never have expected what happened. My pivot led me from leadership of the world’s largest infrastructure legal practice to several justice activities: 1) with several other ILI Fellows, founding “Imago Dei,” Notre Dame’s new program focused on resisting human trafficking, 2) helping to develop a strategy aimed at encouraging wide-spread use of the research done by LEO, the economics lab at Notre Dame that studies the efficacy of domestic anti-poverty programs; and 3) teaching a course at Columbia University on managing and resolving conflict in large infrastructure projects.

Before this latest chapter, I graduated from NYU with a degree in economics wanting to be a development economist and ended up going to law school instead. In law school at Cardozo School of Law, I hoped to be a small firm lawyer in Vermont and instead went into big firm practice as a litigator at Paul, Weiss – one of New York’s biggest law firms. Eventually, I combined my interest in international economics and law in building the infrastructure practice at the law firm, Dentons. Throughout, I have felt drawn to walk with people on the margins and have answered that call by laying bricks for homes people dispossessed by a hurricane in Honduras, helping to draft the UN Millennium Development Goals and serving in a variety of roles that allowed me to walk with people who are underserved. In my free time, I enjoy the outdoors, dogs, cooking and politics.