Lani Guinier, law professor and embattled Justice Dept. nominee, dies at 71 - The Washington Post

Lani Guinier, a lawyer whose innovative and provocative writings on racial justice and voting rights were used to undermine her nomination to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division early in the presidency of Bill Clinton, died Jan. 7 at an assisted-living facility in Cambridge, Mass. She was 71.

Ms. Guinier (pronounced gwuh-NEAR) spent much of her career at the elite levels of her profession as a graduate of one Ivy League law school and a professor at two others, as a Justice Department lawyer during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, and as a litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s.

She was a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania when she was nominated in 1993 to lead the Civil Rights Division. Some people said it was a job she had been training for all her life.

Seeking to deal a blow to Clinton, conservative activists seized on Ms. Guinier’s articles in law journals to discredit her as a radical reformer who sought to overturn the country’s election system and remake society.

In some of her writings, Ms. Guinier recommended changes in electoral procedures that would give Black citizens and other minorities a greater say in the outcome of legislation affecting their lives. Winner-take-all elections, Ms. Guinier argued, too often allow the majority to ignore the needs of everyone else. She called for proportional voting and other measures that would ensure increased representation of minorities and a more cooperative, nonpartisan approach to legislating.

In a controversial article from 1991, she called for Black political candidates to be “not just physically black” but to demonstrate a “cultural and psychological view of group solidarity.” She advocated “anti-discrimination” policies under which “roughly equal outcomes, not merely an apparently fair process, are the goal.”

Ms. Guinier’s thinking has become more mainstream in recent years, as anti-racist practices and implicit bias training in the workplace have become more commonplace. In the early 1990s, however, these ideas proved to be incendiary. Conservative outlets launched an all-out assault on Ms. Guinier, led by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which called a her “quota queen.”

Republicans were seeking political retribution after the bruising treatment of Supreme Court nominees Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas, which resulted in Bork’s rejection and Thomas’s narrow confirmation to the high court. (Thomas and Ms. Guinier were Yale Law School classmates.)

The Clinton White House told Ms. Guinier not to give any interviews before her Senate confirmation hearings, which allowed political opponents to portray her in harsh, sometimes nastily personal ways. Senate Minority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) asserted that Ms. Guinier was “consistently hostile to the principle of one-person-one vote, consistently hostile to majority rule and a consistent supporter not only of quotas but of vote-rigging schemes that make quotas look mild.”

“I have always believed in democracy, and nothing I have ever written is inconsistent with that,” she said in a news conference the next day. “I am a democratic idealist who believes that politics need not be forever seen as an `I win, you lose’ dynamic in which some people are permanent, monopoly winners and others are permanent, excluded losers.”

Civil rights leaders and advocates for women were outraged. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus boycotted meetings with Clinton.

Ms. Guinier returned to the classroom and became a nationally recognized authority on civil rights, racism and political reform. She gave speeches throughout the country and, in 1998, became the first tenured Black female professor at Harvard Law School.

At a symposium at Yale in 2021, Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called Ms. Guinier “easily the most intellectually powerful, towering figure I had ever met.”

Ms. Guinier continued to write about voting rights, racial justice and political equity. In her 1994 book “The Tyranny of the Majority,” she cited James Madison to warn that a narrow majority of voters could deny justice and a political voice to a substantial portion of the population.

“Where the majority is fixed and permanent, there are no checks on its ability to be overbearing,” Ms. Guinier wrote. “A majority that does not worry about defectors is a majority with total power. This is precisely the danger presented by racism.

“My point is simple: 51 percent of the people should not always get 100 percent of the power; 51 percent of the people should certainly not get all the power if they use that power to exclude the 49 percent. In that case we do not have majority rule. We have majority tyranny.”

Her father had to drop out of Harvard in the early 1930s when he could not receive financial aid. He spent years working as an elevator operator and selling real estate before completing law school at New York University. In 1969, he became the first head of African American studies at Harvard.

Ms. Guinier and her sisters observed Jewish holidays with their mother’s family, but they identified primarily as Black. After graduating third in her high school class of more than 1,400 students, Ms. Guinier went to Radcliffe, a now-defunct women’s college then affiliated with Harvard, graduating in 1971. She was a 1974 graduate of Yale Law School, where she was friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

After clerking for a federal judge, Ms. Guinier joined the Justice Department in 1977 and worked in the Civil Rights Division, then led by Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days III. At the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s, Ms. Guinier reportedly won 30 of the 32 cases she tried.

She taught at New York University’s law school for a few years before joining the law faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. Her books included the autobiographical “Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into New Vision of Social Justice” (1998); “Who’s Qualified?," a 2001 book about affirmative action written with Susan Sturm; and “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America” (2015).

Survivors include her husband of 35 years, lawyer and professor Nolan Bowie; their son, Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard law professor; a stepdaughter, Dana Rice; three sisters; and a granddaughter.

Ms. Guinier was 12 when she decided to become a lawyer, after watching television reports of the turmoil surrounding James Meredith’s enrollment as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. He was escorted through an angry White crowd by NAACP lawyer Constance Baker Motley, an African American woman who later became a federal judge.

“I said to myself,” Ms. Guinier recalled in 1999, “‘I can do that, I can be a woman lawyer in the cause of civil rights.’”

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/01/09/harvard-law-prof-lani-guinier-dies/

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