Law Prof Guinier heads to Harvard

Lani Guinier, the noted and controversial legal scholar, will return to her alma mater. Law Professor Lani Guinier, a former Clinton nominee for the top civil rights post in the Justice Department, will become Harvard Law School's first female minority professor next fall. Guinier, who has written books on voting rights, democratic theory, affirmative action and legal education, will leave Penn at the end of the semester to become a professor at her alma mater. She received a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1971. Guinier, a classmate of President Clinton's at Yale Law School, gained notoriety in 1993 when Clinton nominated her for the position of assistant attorney general for civil rights. Her nomination was withdrawn two months later amid a controversy that followed the publication of an editorial in The Wall Street Journal that criticized Guinier's views as radical and anti-democratic. Penn Law School Dean Colin Diver, who learned of Guinier's decision two weeks ago, said he is "very sorry to see her go." Harvard initially offered Guinier a position three years ago, Diver said. Although Diver hoped that Guinier would remain at Penn permanently, he said he wishes her the best of luck at Harvard. Describing Guinier as an "extraordinarily effective teacher" and "first-rate scholar," Harvard Law School Dean Robert Clark expressed delight in Guinier's decision in a statement Friday. "I expect her appointment will help the school to attract other top scholars of diverse backgrounds, including more women of color," he said. Guinier declined to comment when reached at home last night. But in a statement, she said she is "happy to join a university that is building a remarkable corps of public intellectuals devoted to issues of race and equality." "Though I am the first woman of color to join the tenured faculty, I know that I will not be the last, and this is important to me," she said. In the past, Guinier and her fellow Law School faculty members have strongly defended her scholarship and views, denying that they reflect "anti-democratic opinions." In a 1994 interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, less than a year after Clinton withdrew her name from consideration for the Justice Department post, she claimed that critics had not thoroughly studied her ideas. Diver recalled how Guinier "was under attack from the right wing" and how Law faculty members "pitched in to support her" by writing editorials in her support, among other things. Guinier, who worked for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division under the Carter administration and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Legal Defense Fund, said she tried to resist becoming a civil rights figurehead. "I am committed to making America better and I am committed to being a voice of conscience," she told the DP in an article published Dec. 7, 1993. "But I really do resist the symbolism, both positive and negative, that other people have attached to me." During that interview, Guinier explained that the ordeal "in some ways has made me more comfortable with who I am because when you've experienced the nightmare of public humiliation? there's not too much that somebody can throw at you. "It's almost as if they've said it all. And so I've survived and now I can be who I am because, in that sense, whatever somebody says to me, I've heard it before."

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