![Lani Guinier, civil rights lawyer, professor dead at 71](https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2022/01/lani-guinier-2.jpg)
Lani Guinier, civil rights lawyer, professor dead at 71
Fox News
Lani Guinier, a civil rights lawyer and scholar whose nomination by President Bill Clinton to head the Justice Department's civil rights division was pulled after conservatives criticized her views on correcting racial discrimination, has died. She was 71.
Guinier became the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School when she joined the faculty in 1998. Before that she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's law school. She had previously headed the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s and served during President Jimmy Carter's administration in the Justice Department's civil rights division.
"I have always wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. This lifelong ambition is based on a deep-seated commitment to democratic fair play — to playing by the rules as long as the rules are fair. When the rules seem unfair, I have worked to change them, not subvert them," Guinier wrote in her 1994 book, "Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy."