Here’s a three-step summary of American politics. Conservatives harp about bad governance. Liberals ignore them and boost funding anyway, with the occasional exception of police. Then conservatives give up and bad governance goes on.

You know the results—dreary schools, dangerous streets and poor, costly services. But politicians bent on reform tend to hit the same wall: government unions. Philip Howard has spent three decades studying this problem, and he’s convinced it can never be solved through ordinary politics. Only the courts can uproot public unions and restore accountable government.

Mr. Howard, a lawyer and writer, first noticed how unions stymie governance during his public service in New York as a member of a neighborhood zoning board and chairman of the Municipal Art Society. “I kept wondering why my friends who had responsible jobs in government couldn’t do what they thought was right,” he recalls. That might be speeding up a land-use review for a construction project or approving repairs on a school building.

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