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 denounced her as a “quota queen.”
