Lani Guinier (; born April 19, 1950 ) is an American lawyer, scholar and civil rights activist.

Born in New York City, Guinier is the daughter of a white Jewish mother, Eugenia Paprin, and the black Jamaican-born scholar Ewart Guinier, who also served as Harvard professor ( and chair ) of the Afro-American Studies Department in 1969.

In this work and others, Guinier suggests various ideas to strengthen minority groups ' voting power, and rectify what is, according to her, an unfair voting system.

A later development in X-ray cameras is the Guinier camera.

Former law clerks also include Lani Guinier, first African-American woman to gain tenure at Harvard Law School ; Judge Eric L. Clay, who now serves with Judge Keith on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ; Ronald Machen, the current United States Attorney for the District of Columbia ; Constance L. Rice, prominent civil rights activist and co-founder of the Advancement Project ; Rashad Hussain, Deputy Associate Council to President Barack Obama, and the U. S. representative to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference ; and Jocelyn F. Benson, an Assistant Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School and the 2010 Democratic candidate for Michigan Secretary of State.

Guinier was attacked by Clint Bolick of the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page as one of " Clinton's Quota Queens ".

Guinier was Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for 10 years, before being hired by Harvard Law School in 1998.

In 1994, legal scholar Lani Guinier used the phrase as the title for a collection of law review articles.

* Safford, John C. Calhoun, " Lani Guinier, and Minority Rights ," PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol.

* Safford, John L. " John C. Calhoun, Lani Guinier, and Minority Rights ," PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol.

The failed Kimba Wood and Lani Guinier appointments were also within his purview.

Guinier has said that she wanted to be a civil rights lawyer since she was twelve years old.

The charge was false ; Guinier had many times explicitly rejected the use of racial quotas in her law review articles.

Since 2001, Guinier has been active in civil rights in higher education, coining the term " confirmative action " to reconceptualize issues of diversity, fairness, and affirmative action.

Because public and private institutions of higher learning are almost all to some extent publicly funded ( i. e., federal student loans and research grants ), Guinier has argued that the nation has a vested interest in seeing that all students have access to higher education and that these graduates " contribute as leaders in our democratic polity ".

By linking diversity to merit, Guinier thereby seeks to argue that preferential treatment of minority students " confirms the public character and democratic missions of higher-education institutions.

* Booknotes interview with Guinier on The Tyranny of the Majority, June 26, 1994.

Some of Penn's former faculty members have continued their carriers at other institutions, e. g. Bruce Ackerman ( now at Yale ), Lani Guinier ( now at Harvard ), Michael H. Schill ( now at Chicago ), and Myron T. Steele ( now at Virginia ).

In 2008, The Nation editorial board was composed of Deepak Bhargava, Norman Birnbaum, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Falk, Frances FitzGerald, Eric Foner, Philip Green, Lani Guinier, Tom Hayden, Randall Kennedy, Tony Kushner, Elinor Langer, Deborah Meier, Toni Morrison, Victor Navasky, Pedro Antonio Noguera, Richard Parker, Michael Pertschuk, Elizabeth Pochoda, Marcus G. Raskin, Andrea Batista Schlesinger, David Weir, and Roger Wilkins.

Past lecturers include Howard Zinn, Winona LaDuke, Lani Guinier, Barbara Ehrenreich, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Cornel West, Christopher Hitchens, Adam Hochschild, Amy Goodman, Molly Ivins, Jeff Chang, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Seymour Hersh, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Naomi Klein, Elizabeth Warren, and Robert Reich.

`` Now that Bruno Walter is virtually in retirement and my dear friend Dimitri Mitropoulos is no longer with us, I am probably the only one -- with the possible exception of Leonard Bernstein -- who has this special affinity for and champions the works of Bruckner and Mahler ''.

This is an unsolved problem which probably has never been seriously investigated, although one frequently hears the comment that we have insufficient specialists of the kind who can compete with the Germans or Swiss, for example, in precision machinery and mathematics, or the Finns in geochemistry.

There is probably some significance in the fact that two of the best incest stories I have encountered in recent years are burlesques of the incest myth.

He is probably our most original composer ; ;

To Adams that age in which religion exercised power over the entire culture of the race was one of imagination, and it is largely the admiration he so obviously held for such eras that betrays a peculiar religiosity -- a sentiment he would have probably denied.

If man is actually the product of his environment and if science can discover the laws of human nature and the ways in which environment determines what people do, then someone -- a someone probably standing outside traditional systems of values -- can turn around and develop completely efficient means for controlling people.

The 15th Street deposit is not to be confused with the nearby famous Mayflower Hotel cypress swamp on 17th Street reported in The Washington Post, August 2, 1955, which was probably formed during the second interglacial period and is therefore much younger.

Pauling's estimate of 200 megatons yield from the present series of Russian tests will probably turn out to be too high, but a total of 100 megatons is a distinct possibility.

Some government scientists say privately that the figure probably is closer to 80 megatons, and that the full 50-megaton bomb that Khrushchev mentioned may still be detonated.

`` Fanny and Mrs. Godwin will probably be glad to hear that Mary has safely recovered from a very favorable confinement, and that her child is well ''.

Of all advantages, probably none is more important than the elimination of tax anticipation notes.

It has been correctly pointed out by well-informed people in the industry that it is probably unrealistic to expect a continuation of the yearly growth of 15% or better that characterized the decade of the 1950's, and that our military markets may be entering upon a new phase in which procurement of multiple weapons systems will give way to concentration of still undeveloped areas of our defense capability.

You name it, our industry is producing it, and it probably is made in different models.

Richard S. Allen is the authority for the statement that the northern section was probably roofed by 1810.

It is well to bear in mind that gasoline will cost from $.80 to $.90 for the equivalent of a United States gallon and while you might prefer a familiar Ford, Chevrolet or even a Cadillac, which are available in some countries, it is probably wiser to choose the smaller European makes which average thirty, thirty-five and even forty miles to the gallon.

For example, probably very few people know that the word `` visrhanik '' that is bantered about so much today stems from the verb `` bouanahsha '': to salivate.

Now, you probably share the widespread Western belief that the Lord Buddha is the most compassionate of the gods, much more so than Jehovah and Allah and the rest.

The elasticity is a parameter of fluids which is not subject to simple measurement at present, and it is a parameter which is probably varying in an unknown manner with many commercial materials.

I want the room in the attic prepared for him He is a most unusual lad, quite precocious in many ways.

In fact it has caused us to give serious thought to moving our residence south, because it is not easy for the most objective Southerner to sit calmly by when his host is telling a roomful of people that the only way to deal with Southerners who oppose integration is to send in troops and shoot the bastards down.

but for this discussion the most important division is between those who have been reconstructed and those who haven't.

But apart from racial problems, the old unreconstructed South -- to use the moderate words favored by Mr. Thomas Griffith -- finds itself unsympathetic to most of what is different about the civilization of the North.

The general acceptance of the idea of governmental ( i.e., societal ) responsibility for the economic well-being of the American people is surely one of the two most significant watersheds in American constitutional history.

Accidental war is so sensitive a subject that most of the people who could become directly involved in one are told just enough so they can perform their portions of incredibly complex tasks.

Even though in most cases the completion of the definitive editions of their writings is still years off, enough documentation has already been assembled to warrant drawing a new composite profile of the leadership which performed the heroic dual feats of winning American independence and founding a new nation.

It is clear that, while most writers enjoy picturing the Negro as a woolly-headed, humble old agrarian who mutters `` yassuhs '' and `` sho' nufs '' with blissful deference to his white employer ( or, in Old South terms, `` massuh '' ), this stereotype is doomed to become in reality as obsolete as Caldwell's Lester.

Presenting an individualized Negro character, it would seem, is one of the most difficult assignments a Southern writer could tackle ; ;

All but the most rabid of Confederate flag wavers admit that the Old Southern tradition is defunct in actuality and sigh that its passing was accompanied by the disappearance of many genteel and aristocratic traditions of the reputedly languid ante-bellum way of life.

Yet often fear persists because, even with the most rigid ritual, one is never quite free from the uneasy feeling that one might make some mistake or that in every previous execution one had been unaware of the really decisive act.

Perhaps the most illuminating example of the reduction of fear through understanding is derived from our increased knowledge of the nature of disease.

The consciousness it mirrors may have come earlier to Europe than to America, but it is the consciousness that most `` mature '' societies arrive at when their successes in technological and economic systematization propel them into a time of examining the not-strictly-practical ends of culture.

And the life they lead is undisciplined and for the most part unproductive, even though they make a fetish of devoting themselves to some creative pursuit -- writing, painting, music.

The music which Lautner has composed for this episode is for the most part `` rather pretty and perfectly banal ''.

Presupposed in Plato's system is a doctrine of levels of insight, in which a certain kind of detached understanding is alone capable of penetrating to the most sublime wisdom.

As long as perception is seen as composed only of isolated sense data, most of the quality and interconnectedness of existence loses its objectivity, becomes an invention of consciousness, and the result is a philosophical scepticism.

And it is precisely in this poorer economic class that one finds, and has always found, the most racial friction.

It is something which most of us try to get out from under.

We assume for this illustration that the size of the land plots is so great that the distance between dwellings is greater than the voice can carry and that most of the communication is between nearest neighbors only, as shown in Figure 2.