Harvard Law Professor Lani Guinier leads discussion
Renowned civil rights scholar Lani Guinier led a lunch discussion with Duke Law School students and faculty on Sunday, Jan. 19. The event was co-sponsored by the Black Law Students Association, the Women's Law Student Association, the Distinguished Speakers Fund, the Office of Public Interest and Pro Bono, and the Office of Student Affairs.
Guinier, Bennett Boskey professor of law at Harvard University, presented the keynote address of Duke University's 2003 commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at 4:00 p.m. that afternoon at Duke Chapel.
In 1998, Lani Guinier became the first black woman to be appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she was a tenured professor for ten years at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. During the 1980s, she was head of the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and had served in the Civil Rights Division during the Carter Administration as special assistant to then-Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days. Guinier came to public attention when she was nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1993 to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, only to have her name withdrawn without a confirmation hearing. Guinier turned that incident into a powerful personal and political memoir, Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice.