The ideas that cost Lani Guinier a nomination in 1993 remain a roadmap for reforming a system resistant to change.
Lani Guinier’s birthday was earlier this month. She would have been 76 years old. And on April 19, I found myself, as I do each year when her birthday comes around, not reaching for words to describe her work, because her work speaks for itself, but reaching for a memory.
I first met Guinier when I was 15. My best friend’s father was the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and he hosted a cocktail party for her when she had just joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. I still remember the buzz in the room when she was introduced, and the feeling even at 15 that I was in the presence of someone very important.
She spoke that evening with such clarity and conviction about the Voting Rights Act, the right to vote, and the right to real representation that something settled in me. Her words directly impacted the direction of my life path, providing a north star I have not lost sight of since.
More than a decade later, my path crossed with Lani Guinier’s again, this time in Cincinnati with my husband, Rob Richie—and not at a cocktail party, but sleeping on the basement floor of a local union leader, trying to help the city restore the proportional form of ranked-choice voting.
We had volunteer energy, strong endorsements, 70 percent of the Black vote, and $15,000.
We fell short, 55 to 45.
But out of that effort, in June of 1992, we helped found Citizens for Proportional Representation, that later became FairVote. FairVote was a small, scrappy band of democratic idealists who believed, as Guinier did, that the rules of our democracy were not fixed facts but deliberate choices. As well, different choices could produce a more just and representative world.
Just a year after FairVote’s founding, President Bill Clinton nominated Lani to lead the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in the summer of 1993. Our small proportional voting community was thrilled. We assumed her appointment would bring her ideas about proportional representation—the same ideas she had developed in a brilliant series of law review articles—into the mainstream at last.
Instead, what followed was one of the ugliest episodes I have witnessed in public life. She was labeled the “quota queen,” her scholarship grotesquely distorted, and the nomination was withdrawn. This was in part because of her support for proportional voting. Rob and her many valued colleagues did everything they could to correct the record and continue to do so to this day.
While her nomination withdrawal was disheartening to me, here is what I want you to know about Lani Guinier: She called it her “diss-appointment,” and she got back to work. She went on Nightline and gave speeches across the country. Guinier defended her ideas with the same eloquence and conviction she had shown in that Philadelphia living room decades before, and she kept pushing, kept building, kept believing.
Lani Guinier was one of FairVote’s most loyal and generous donors from the very beginning. She introduced my husband Rob as one of the most important people working for democracy in America, back when almost no one was talking about proportional representation.
When FairVote celebrated her as a Champion of Democracy in Cincinnati in 1994, Guinier connected her scholarship directly to the local story of a city that had once elected its council by proportional representation, lost it, and paid the price with years of an all-white council.
We honored her again in 2017, when Rashad Robinson of Color of Change gave a passionate introduction before a large New York audience. Already well into the disease that would ultimately end her life, Guinier accepted the award gracefully from home.
That same year, the three of us had dinner together in Cambridge, Mass. Even as her short-term memory faded, Lani still had so many stories to tell: about her years as a voting rights litigator, about the cases she had argued, about what she had believed and still believed about the promise of American democracy. She remembered Rob and me as “those people who came to my defense during the nomination debacle.”
At some point during that dinner, we got to talking about racial and gender quotas. Lani Guinier leaned toward me with a playful gleam, lifted that mythical “quota queen crown” from her head, and placed it on mine. She anointed me, she said, as the next Quota Queen. We laughed together at the ridiculousness of the accusations that had been leveled at her all those years ago, and we agreed that we were sisters in this work, in the fight for a democracy where everyone has a right to vote, a meaningful vote, representation and real actual power in government.
I have been carrying that crown ever since.
Lani Guinier died in January 2022, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Her son Niko—who later served on the FairVote board and now holds a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School, walking in his mother’s considerable footsteps—gave his blessing to FairVote’s first Lani Guinier voting rights fellow. Her legacy is not sitting still and will never be forgotten.
We carry it forward at RepresentWomen as well. Just this month, we kicked off our new Democracy Solutions Series with a timely conversation: “The Voting Rights Act and Women’s Representation”—breaking down what it protects, what’s at stake, and what Lani Guinier’s vision means for the work ahead. I hope you’ll watch the recording and explore our updated Voting Rights Act page, which reflects her work at every turn.
We are heartened to know we are not the only ones keeping her legacy alive, as just this Tuesday we had the honor of gathering to celebrate Lani Guinier’s life and legacy at the “Lift Every Voice” conference in Minneapolis. The event’s name comes directly from Guinier’s own book, Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into a New Vision of Social Justice. This book was her deeply personal account of what she took from the nomination battle and what she chose to build from it instead.
I had the honor of speaking at the inaugural event in 2023, where I had the chance to share what Lani Guinier meant to me personally and to this movement, some of which you’ve just read above. To be back in that room again, this time to celebrate her at a dinner in her name, feels like exactly the kind of full-circle moment she would have savored.
It feels especially timely that we all gathered this week, because less than 24 hours after our time together, we were left to absorb the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a decision that has effectively stripped Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of its practical force.
The urgency of this work has never been clearer.
Lani Guinier understood, perhaps better than anyone, that the right to vote means nothing without the right to real representation. That is exactly what was at stake today. And it is exactly what we are still working toward, and what she gave her life to: a democracy designed so that every voice could not just be heard, but actually matter. This week’s setback is heartbreaking. But it is not the end.
So, as Americans across the country hold the heaviness and disappointment today, I want to close with her own words, spoken in the aftermath of her “diss-appointment” in 1993, because they deserve to be read slowly and in full:
“I have always believed in democracy, and nothing I have ever written is inconsistent with that. I have always believed in one man, one vote, and nothing I have ever written is inconsistent with that.
“I have always believed in fundamental fairness, and nothing I have ever written is inconsistent with that.
“I am a democratic idealist who believes that politics need not be forever seen as an ‘I win, you lose’ dynamic in which some people are permanent, monopoly winners and others are permanent, excluded losers. Everything I have written is consistent with that. I hope that what has happened to my nomination does not mean that future nominees will not be allowed to explain their views as soon as any controversy arises.
“I hope that we are not witnessing that dawning of a new intellectual orthodoxy in which thoughtful people can no longer debate provocative ideas without denying the country their talents as public servants.
“I also hope that we can learn some positive lessons from this experience, lessons about the importance of public dialogue on race in which all perspectives are represented and in which no one viewpoint monopolizes, distorts, caricatures or shapes the outcome.
“Although the president and I disagree about his decision to withdraw my nomination, I continue to respect the president. We disagree about this, but we agree about many things. He believes in racial healing and so do I.”
That is the vision we are still working toward alongside incredible leaders in the movement, including Spencer Overton of the Multiracial Democracy Project at George Washington University Law School, April England-Albright of Black Voters Matter, Saint Paul City Councilor Hwa Jeong Kim, and many others.
That is the legacy we carry together.
