Lani Guinier

In 1998, Lani Guinier became the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School. Before her Harvard appointment, she was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Guinier has published many books, including The Tyranny of the Majority, Becoming Gentlemen (with Michelle Fine and Jane Balin), Lift Every Voice, and The Miner’s Canary (coauthored with Gerald Torres). She was a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund during the 1980s and was the Special Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights during the Carter Administration. In 1993 President Clinton nominated her to be the first black woman to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which set off a firestorm of controversy. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.