Carol Lani Guinier ( ; April 19, 1950 – January 7, 2022) was an American educator, legal scholar, and civil rights theorist. She was the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship there. Before coming to Harvard in 1998, Guinier taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for ten years. Her scholarship covered the professional responsibilities of public lawyers, the relationship between democracy and the law, the role of race and gender in the political process, college admissions, and affirmative action. In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated Guinier to be United States Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, but withdrew the nomination.
Early life and career
Carol Lani Guinier was born on April 19, 1950, in New York City, to Eugenia "Genii" Paprin and Ewart Guinier. Ewart, who was born in Panama to Jamaican parents and raised in Panama and Boston, was one of two black students admitted to Harvard College in 1929. He was forced to drop out in 1931, unable to afford school after he was excluded from financial aid and campus housing, but he ultimately returned to Harvard as a professor and the first chair of the Afro-American Studies Department in 1969. Paprin, an Ashkenazi-Jewish civil-rights activist, graduated from Hunter College in 1939. Guinier's parents met in Hawaii Territory, where each was a member of the Communist Party of Hawaii and of the Hawaii Civil Rights Congress. Guinier's father was also a national officer for the United Public Workers of America, a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union. Her uncle was real estate developer and social activist Maurice Paprin. Guinier moved with her family to Hollis, Queens, in 1956.
Guinier 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 earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College of Harvard University 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. She was a highly successful litigator for LDF, winning 31 of the 32 cases she argued. She also worked on the successful extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982.
Nomination for Assistant Attorney General
Guinier was President Bill Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in April 1993. Conservative journalists and Republican senators mounted a campaign against Guinier's nomination. Guinier was dubbed a "quota queen," a phrase first used in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Clint Bolick, a Reagan-era U.S. 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 opposed racial quotas, as she attempted to make clear, responding to the misrepresentation of her views by invoking her father's experience at Harvard: "He was a victim of a racial quota, a quota of one. I have never been in favor of quotas. I could not be, knowing my father's experience." As one reviewer of her work wrote: "The remedies Guinier advocates for diluted minority voting rights do not include laws that guarantee election outcomes for disadvantaged groups."
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." Political science and law professor Carol M. Swain argued 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 properly 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 Clinton that Guinier's interviews with senators were going poorly and urged him to withdraw Guinier's nomination.