Lani Guinier

We were saddened to read this morning of the death of Lani Guinier. She was a leftist law professor at Harvard specializing in voting rights. We didn’t know her well. In the 1990s, we played a glancing role in stoking the controversy that led President Clinton to pull her nomination to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. Yet we eventually tried to dial her into the debate on charter revision at New York.The controversy over Guinier’s nomination to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division erupted in 1993. It was ignited by a story by David Twersky in the Forward, which we were then editing. It reported on writings by Guinier suggesting that the Constitution required the election of minorities to public office. The Wall Street Journal summed her up in a now-famous headline “Quota Queen.”The Forward argued that Guinier deserved a hearing in the Senate. In the event, though, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, one Joseph Biden, doomed her candidacy, saying that if she tried to defend her views, she wouldn’t have a shot. Mr. Clinton soon withdrew her nomination. Guinier, who’d been teaching law at Penn, won a plum position at Harvard Law School.Our acquaintance of Guinier grew from a review we’d issued in the Sun of a collection of brilliant essays by the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg. He, like Guinier, was a partisan of the system of voting known as proportional representation. It’s the idea that, as we once described it in the New York Post, seats in a legislature should be parceled out according to the percentage of votes won by the parties.Professor Guinier argued that some version of PR should be tried in some southern states that had large numbers of African Americans but were failing to elect them to public office. A version of proportional representation is used in Israel. New York City tried proportional representation in the 1930s and 1940s. Its “main effect,” we once wrote, was electing two communists to the City Council.In our review of Mr. Hertzberg’s book, we’d noted that Guinier’s father, Ewart, who’d once run for president of Manhattan on the line of the pro-communist American Labor Party, had favored proportional representation. After the review was published, we received a note from Lani Guinier, saying that it wasn’t her father but rather her own work on voting rights that had led her to proportional representation.So we asked whether we could call on her when we were next in Cambridge. She received us in her office for what, for us, was an illuminating conversation. We mentioned that in 1947, when PR was ended in New York, the Sun had called it an “un-American monstrosity.” She fixed on us and said: “You know, if you had proportional representation in New York today, the city council would have some Republicans.”Rarely have we been stopped so cold in our tracks. “Humina, humina, humina,” we said in our best Jackie Gleason, or words to that effect. It would be an exaggeration to say that she made us an advocate of proportional representation. We did, though, write a piece suggesting that Mayor Bloomberg, as he prepared his proposed revisions to the city charter, invite Professor Guinier in for lunch.So far as we can tell, it never happened. Not even Henry Stern, then City Parks Commissioner and once a fan of proportional representation, was prepared to back the idea in the 21st Century. And whether Lani Guinier’s ideas might have saved the City Council is anyone’s guess. Then again also, too, it’s hard to see how it could have been worse than the current council. May she rest in peace.________Image: Detail of a photograph by John Mathew Smith and www.celebrity-photos.com, via Wikipedia.

Lani Guinier

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