Lani Guinier, "Second Proms and Second Primaries: The Limits of Majority Rule"

Lani Guinier (gwen-ear) rose to national prominence in 1993 when she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to fill the post of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the U.S. Justice Department. At the time of her nomination, Guinier was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was primarily known in academic circles for having written extensively on how the electoral system might be reformed to better represent all of the nation's citizens in local, state, and national governing bodies. Within weeks of being nominated, however, Guinier found herself regularly pilloried in the press as the "quota queen" and, eventually, had her nomination withdrawn by Clinton who declared her ideas to be "undemocratic."

In an interview that followed shortly afterward, Guinier reflected back on the experience of having had her ideas distorted and of having been deprived a chance to defend her positions: "I would like to think that I stood on principle and that I didn't lose. I lost a job, . . . but I have a job for life [as a professor with tenure]. So [having the nomination withdrawn] really wasn't about my personal story but about the larger story of what my experience meant for the American people and our inability to have a genuine, meaningful conversation about race without name-calling and finger-pointing." Guinier has subsequently published a series of books that outline her commitment to what she terms in "Second Proms and Second Primaries" "the ideal of democracy," including The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (1995); Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (1998) ; and with Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (2002).

The first African American woman to be appointed to the faculty at Harvard University Law School, Guinier is particularly sensitive to the limits of a political system that embraces "the worst excesses of the adversarial model of litigation, the 'winner take all' model of sports, and the 'only one of you is going to be left standing' model of war." By focusing on race, voting rights, and representation, Guinier has sought to revive national discussion about the meaning of democracy in an increasingly heterogeneous world: What is the meaning of democracy, Guinier asks, if voting minorities have no way to make their voices heard?

Guinier, Lani. "Second Prom and Second Primaries: The Limits of Majority Rule," Boston Review. Oct/Nov 1992. 32-34.
Quotations and biographical information from Lani Guinier, "An Interview with Brian Lamb," 26 June 1994; Lani Guinier, "A 'Commonplace' Conversation with Lani Guinier," interview by Lise Funderburg. African American Review, 30 (1996): 196-204.
Digital image drawn from the home page of Indiana University.

Links to Explore:

Making Every Vote Count: in this article, which appeared in The Nation in December, 2000, Guinier provides her assessment of the significance of the voting problems that arose in Florida during the Fall 2000 Presidential election. Interview with Lani Guinier: this interview, conducted by Brain Lamb in 1994, came shortly after Guinier's nomination for the position of assistant attorney general for civil rights. Guinier reflects back on this political process and offers suggestions about why the Clinton administration was unable to see her nomination through to the end.

Institute for Justice: home page for a litigation team dedicated to helping those who would prefer to "protect individual rights rather than expand government." Clint Bolick, the Institute's Vice President and Director of Litigation, is credited with bringing down Guinier's nomination as assistant attorney general by branding her a "quota queen."

US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division Voting Section: from the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, this page devoted to frequently asked questions provides an introduction to civil rights legislation and to the role the Department of Justices plays in guaranteeing all citizens access to voting. The home page for the Civil Rights Division provides additional links to cases and briefs currently under consideration and more general information about the responsibilities of this division of the Justice Department.

The Center for Voting and Democracy: home page for a "nonpartisan, non-profit organization that studies how voting systems affect participation, representation and governance." Site includes succinct definitions of proportional representation and redistricting, as well as links to the most recent news stories on voting issues.

Questions for Learning:

• When Lani Guinier calls for "one vote, one value" in Making Every Vote Count, what does she mean? And if, as Guinier's statistics state, it is the case that less that 50% of those eligible to vote do so, what does it mean to argue that the survival of democracy depends on voting?

• After you've toured the Institute for Justice's web site, how would you define their vision of democracy? How does the Institute's vision differ from Guinier's? What alternatives do the Institute's litigators offer to the parties that Guinier is most concerned with? That is, how would the Institute's litigators address the problems with under-representation, disenfranchisement, and disaffection that Guinier discusses in "Second Proms"?
  
  

• How does the Department of Justice define the problem of racial discrimination as it applies to voting? What protections does the Department provide? What solutions does it offer for geographically concentrated racial minorities? Is there anything in the Department of Justice's statutes, as represented on the Civil Rights pages, that would disallow the solutions that Guinier has proposed?
  
  

• The Center for Voting and Democracy states that they "believe voting system reform is essential to reinvigorate American politics, to decrease the impact of money in elections and to ensure majority rule, full representation and greater participation." What specific proposals do they back to achieve these goals? How is it that The Center for Voting and Democracy and the Institute for Justice both approach the same issues and come to such diametrically opposed conclusions? Which approach do you believe would assist the nation is approaching "the ideal of democracy"?

Questions for Connecting:

• Guinier argues that "[a] homogeneous legislature in a heterogeneous society is simply not legitimate." In making this case, Guinier focuses on underrepresented minorities. In so doing has she fallen into the "antiuniversalist" trap that Martha Nussbaum describes in "Women and Cultural Universals"? Does Guinier's approach support, diverge from, or conflict with Nussbaum's argument that the goal of public planning should be to enhance universal human capabilities? Is a commitment to basic human rights compatible with the differential voting plan Guinier proposes?

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