Lani Guinier

Early life and career

Born in New York City, Guinier is the daughter of a Jewish mother and civil rights activist, Eugenia "Genii" Paprin, and Ewart Guinier, a black Panamanian-born and Jamaican and Harlem-raised scholar who was one of two blacks admitted to Harvard College in 1929. Ewart Guinier was, however, not given financial aid nor was he allowed to live in the dormitories on the purported grounds that he had failed to submit a photograph with his application. After dropping out of Harvard College in 1931 because he could not afford it, he ultimately returned to Harvard as a 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, after she watched on television as Constance Baker Motley helped escort James Meredith, the first black American to enroll in the University of Mississippi. After graduating third in her class from Andrew Jackson High School, Guinier received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1971 and her J.D. degree from Yale Law School in 1974. She clerked for Judge Damon Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, then served as special assistant to Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days in the Civil Rights Division during the Carter Administration. She was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1981, and after Ronald Reagan took office, she joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) as an assistant counsel, eventually becoming head of its Voting Rights project.

Nomination for Assistant Attorney General

Guinier is probably best known as President Bill Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in April 1993.

President Clinton withdrew his nomination in June 1993, following a wave of negative press that was brought on by her controversial writings, some of which even Clinton himself called "anti-democratic" and "very difficult to defend".

Conservative journalists, as well as Republican Senators, mounted a campaign against Guinier's nomination. Guinier was infamously dubbed a "quota queen," a phrase first used in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Clint Bolick, a Reagan-era Justice Department official. The term was perceived by some to be racially loaded, combining the "welfare queen" stereotype with "quota," a buzzword used to challenge affirmative action. In fact, Guinier was an opponent of racial quotas.

Some journalists also alleged that Guinier's writings indicated that she supported the shaping of electoral districts to ensure a black majority, a process known as "race-conscious districting." One New York Times opinion piece claimed that Guinier was in favor of "segregating black voters in black-majority districts." Guinier was portrayed as a racial polarizer who believed—in the words of George Will—that "only blacks can represent blacks."

In the face of the negative media attention, many Democratic Senators, including David Pryor of Arkansas, Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois (the only African-American serving in the Senate at that time) informed President Clinton that her interviews with senators were going poorly and urged him to withdraw Guinier's nomination.

President Clinton took the senators' advice and withdrew Guinier's nomination on June 4, 1993. He stated that Guinier's writings "clearly lend themselves to interpretations that do not represent the views I expressed on civil rights during the [presidential] campaign." Guinier, for her part, acknowledged that her writings were often "unclear and subject to vastly different interpretations," but believed that the political attacks had distorted and caricatured her academic philosophies. William T. Coleman Jr., who had served as Secretary of Transportation under President Gerald Ford, wrote that the withdrawal was "a grave [loss], both for President Clinton and the country. The President's yanking of the nomination, caving in to shrill, unsubstantiated attacks, was not only unfair, but some would say political cowardice."

Alternative voting systems

In her publications, Guinier has suggested various ideas to strengthen minority groups' voting power, and rectify what she characterizes as an unfair voting system, not just for racial minorities, but for all numerical minority groups, including fundamentalist Christians, the Amish, or in states such as Alabama, Democrats. Guinier has also stated 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."

Some of the ideas she considers are:

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 almost all to some extent publicly funded (i.e., federal student 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."

Teaching

Guinier was Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for ten years, before joining 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. In 2007 she was a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, and in 2009 she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Publications

Guinier has authored over two dozen law review articles, as well as five books:

Honors

Guinier has been honored with 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 was also awarded 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 2015 she was awarded the "Deborah W. Meier Hero in Education Award" from Fairtest.

She has received ten honorary degrees, from schools including Smith College, Spelman College, Swarthmore College, and the University of the District of Columbia. In 2007 she delivered the Yale Law School Fowler Harper Lecture, entitled "The Political Representative as Powerful Stranger: Challenges for Democracy."