In Memoriam: Lani Guinier 1950 – 2022
Lani Guinier, the first African-American woman to be tenured at Harvard Law School and an influential scholar who devoted her life to justice, equality, empowerment, and democracy, died Jan. 7.
‘When you look back on your own career decades from now, make sure you can say that you’ve done the work of justice’
Nikolas Bowie ’14, the winner of the Sacks-Freund teaching award, imparts lessons he learned from another great teacher — his mother.
‘Our time is full of injustices … You must not be a product of your time,’ says Nikolas Bowie
“Attaining power does not make you a moral person,” said Nikolas Bowie ’14, assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School, in his April 22 Last Lecture to graduating students.
Celebrating Lani
At an event at Harvard Law School honoring Lani Guinier earlier this year, Susan Sturm invoked a phrase that was familiar to most of the attendees, a mix of Guinier’s family, colleagues, collaborators, friends and students. It was a line that Guinier often used when prodding her students into pushing harder and thinking deeper: “My problem is, if you stop there … ”
“If you stop there …”; Celebrating Guinier in the spirit she has inspired
An event at HLS in February honored the work of Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus and Civil Rights Theorist Lani Guinier. Renowned for her books, including “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy,” Guinier joined the HLS faculty as Bennett Boskey Professor of Law in 1998.
Mentors, Friends and Sometime Adversaries
Mentorships between Harvard Law School professors and the students who followed them into academia have taken many forms over the course of two centuries.
CBA 2016: Turning Vision into Action
Over 800 alumni returned to Harvard Law School for the fourth Celebration of Black Alumni (CBA), Turning Vision into Action. The event brought together generations of black alumni to reconnect with old friends, network with new ones and take part in compelling discussions about the challenges and opportunities in local, national and global communities.
Facing Down Discrimination
Raheemah Abdulaleem ’01 was standing on a Washington, D.C., street corner in 2009 on her way to work at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division when a man yelled at her from his car to “go back to your country.” An African-American who grew up in Philadelphia in a family whose roots in the United States are nearly as old as the country, Abdulaleem was wearing a hijab, the traditional headscarf worn by some Muslim women.
The Price of Admission
For Lani Guinier, the mission of higher education is—or should be—democracy.
NY Times: Lani Guinier redefines diversity, re-evaluates merit
In a recent Q&A in the New York Times, Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier discusses her new book, “The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy” in which she argues for a rethinking of merit, typically measured by standardized test scores, that would better reflect the values of a democratic society.