Lani Guinier

Lani Guinier was the daughter of a Jamaican-born father who was appointed chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard in 1969. She attended Radcliffe College and Yale Law School and was a civil rights attorney for more than ten years, as part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and serving in the Civil Rights Division during the Carter Administration. She was also a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Guinier first came to public attention in 1993 when President Clinton nominated her to be the first black woman to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. But immediately after her name was put forward in 1993, conservatives attacked Guinier's views on democracy and voting (including affirmative action, gender equity, and racial districting), driving Clinton to withdraw her nomination without a confirmation hearing. Guinier joined the faculty at Harvard Law School in 1998, becoming the first black woman tenured professor in that school's history.