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Lani Guinier

Lani Guinier (born April 19, 1950) is an American civil rights scholar. The first black woman tenured professor at Harvard Law School, Guinier's work includes professional responsibilities of public lawyers, the relationship between democracy and the law, the role of race and gender in the political process, equity in college admissions, and affirmative action.

Early Life & Career

Lani Guinier was born on April 19, 1950 in New York City. Guinier is the daughter of a Jewish mother, Eugenia Paprin, and the Jamaican-born scholar Ewart Guinier, who also served as Harvard professor (and chair) of the Afro-American Studies Department in 1969.

Guinier has said that she wanted to be a civil rights lawyer since she was twelve years old. She went on to graduate from Radcliffe College and Yale Law School.

After graduation, she joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) as an assistant counsel. She left the LDF for four years to serve as special assistant to then Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days in the Civil Rights Division in the Carter Administration. After Ronald Reagan took office, she left the Justice Department and rejoined the LDF, eventually becoming head of its Voting Rights project.

Nomination for Assistant Attorney General

Guinier is probably most well-known as President Bill Clinton's nomination for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in late 1993. A combination of factors led to the failure of this nomination.

Guinier was described as 'anti-Constitutional' and 'a quota queen' by various media outlets, citing her views on proportional representation in local elections. In addition, Democratic Senators such as David Pryor of Arkansas and even Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts informed President Clinton that her interviews with Senators were going poorly and urged him to withdraw the nomination.

According to Clinton's autobiography, even Democratic Senator Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, the only African-American who was serving in the upper chamber at that time, urged the President to withdraw Guinier's nomination. President Clinton took the advice of these elected officials and withdrew her nomination, claiming he was unfamiliar with her writing and that he didn't realize that she advocated pure racial quotas as opposed to affirmative action, even though he had been a close friend of Guinier's for years.

Clinton's White House counsel, Bernard Nussbaum, later acknowledged that the President was in fact aware of Guinier's positions on these issues but thought that her overall resume would overcome such handicaps.

Civil Rights Theories

Alternative Voting Systems

Guinier's theories were first presented in law-school publications. They were also aired in part with her 1994 publication, The Tyranny of the Majority

In this work and others, Guinier suggests various ideas to strengthen minority group's voting power, and rectify what is, according to her, an unfair voting system. She claims that she is referring not only to racial minorities, but any numerical minority group, such as fundamentalist Christians, the Amish, or in states such as Alabama, Republicans; she also states that she does not advocate any single procedural rule, but rather that all alternatives be considered in the context of litigation "after the court finds a legal violation" (1994:14).

Some of the ideas she considers are:

cumulative voting, a system in which each voter has "the same number of votes as there are seats or options to vote for, and they can then distribute their votes in any combination to reflect their preferences"--a system often used on corporate boards in thirty states, as well as by school boards, and county commissions.
Multi-member "superdistricts" is another strategy which "modifies winner-take-all majority rule to require that something more than a bare majority of voters must approve or concur before action is taken."

Revising Affirmative Action

Since 2001, Guinier has been active in civil rights in higher education, coining the term "confirmative action" to reconceptualize issues of diversity, fairness, and affirmative action. The process of confirmative action, she says, "ties diversity to the admissions criteria for all students, whatever their race, gender, or ethnic background—including people of color, working-class whites, and even children of privilege."

Because public and private institutions of higher learning are all to some extent publicly-funded (i.e., federal students loans and research grants), Guinier has argued that the nation has a vested interest in seeing that all students have access to higher education, and that these graduates "contribute as leaders in our democratic polity." By linking diversity to merit, Guinier thereby seeks to argue that preferential treatment of minority students "confirms the public character and democratic missions of higher-education institutions. Diversity becomes relevant not only to the college's admissions process but also to its students' educational experiences and to what its graduates actually contribute to American society." (ChronHigherEd 12/14/01).

Academic career

Teaching

Guinier was Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for 10 years, before being hired by Harvard Law School in 1998. She regularly lectures at various other law schools and universities including Yale, Stanford, New York University (NYU), UT Austin, Berkeley, UCLA, Rice, University of Chicago, and over others. She is currently a visiting professor at Columbia Law School.

Writing

Guinier's publications include six books, 29 law review and journal articles. She has also written many newspaper editorials.

Her books are:

The Miner's Canary: Rethinking Race and Power (2002)
Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (1998)
The Tyranny of the Majority (1994)
Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law Schools and Institutional Change, 1995).

Honors

She has been honored with various awards, including the Champion of Democracy Award from the National Women's Political Caucus; the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award from the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession; and the Rosa Parks Award from the American Association of Affirmative Action.

She has received ten honorary degrees from schools including Smith College, Spelman College, Swarthmore College, and the University of the District of Columbia. She has also been recognized for excellence in teaching by the 1994 Harvey Levin Teaching Award at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the 2002 Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence from Harvard Law School. In 2007 she delivered the Yale Law School Fowler Harper Lecture entitled, "The Political Representative as Powerful Stranger: Challenges for Democracy."

References

Clinton Bolick, "Clinton's Quota Queens," Wall Street Journal (op-ed), April 30, 1993
"Clinton faces liberal backlash as he drops civil rights radical," The Times (London, England), June 4, 1993, 14
"Clinton ready to abandon civil rights radical; Lani Guinier." The Times (London, England), June 3, 1993, 13
Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority (Free Press: 1994)
Lani Guinier, Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (Simon and Schuster: 1998).
Laurel Leff, "From legal scholar to quota queen: what happens when politics pulls the press into the groves of academe," Columbia Journalism Review 32:3 (Sept-Oct 1993), 36