Who came up with the quota queen term. I think they were just copying from somebody early on. Host was its fair term . Host why not . Guest because i wasnt a queen and i didnt believe in quotas. I guess somebody liked the fact weretwo cues. I didnt relate to the ken sente did they good at the term from your law righting. Guest quota queen . Host yes. Guest nobody. Ed some made up the term and passed it on to somebody else who wrote an oped in the wall street journal ask that went viral, except that was before we had computers of the kind we have now. Host in your 1998 book lift every voice turning a civil rights setback into a new vision of social justice. You write about that time period when you were nominated. Fewell by car afternoonish caricatures the media soon defined me im kept waiting for the white house to put together a strategy. Meanwhile, the right wing had the field to itself. Guest thats true. Host you go on to where it that quota queen con freighted welfare, quote spas unmarried loud demanding black women. It became part of an organized campaign that continues still to convert the 1960 slogan, power to the people, into quotas for unqualified and undeserving black people. The right wing story was wanted more black, less for whites apparently by any means necessary, including the destruction of democracy. Quota queen made any further communications superfluous. It announced my agenda loud and clear a black woman who did not know her place. I would do to whites what centuries of whites had done to blacks. Guest it speaks for itself. I dont know i have anything to add. That was written in a way that reflected what had happened a year or two years or three years ago. Right now were talking about something that happened 22 years ago. So im not sure what the value is in repeating what they were doing. I think they speak for themselves in their terminology and in their precociousness the assumption that they can attack people based on nonsense but as long as they keep attacking them somehow it the challenge will become like a tsunami. You just get caught up in it. So you need to know how to swim. On the other hand you also need to know how to exit. Host back to your book, lift every voice. We considered ourselves, you write, a group of serious longstanding friends to be the president and first ladys intellectual if not political peers. Each of us shared the sense of important of arrival. We lived in him bill clinton in miss big heartedness, in his park for justice. How did you get to know the president mrs. Clinton. Guest i went to Yale Law School. And they were there. They actually were very helpful to me because while i was at the law school i was competing for something called you get to do a fake litigation and if you do a good job, then you get to move to the next level and they played a role in determining who gets to be a participant in the barristers union, and although there was another student who was challenging me, they were much more sympathetic to the argumented was making and as a result ended up participating in the finals of the barristers union. So in that sense i got to know them, and then later on, after i graduated from law school there was a program in an annual program in i guess South Carolina right off the coast, during the period between december and january or the first part of january, and they were both hillary and bill were at that retreat and my husband, his daughter and i also came to the retreat and thats where i got to know them a little bit better because hillary and i were on the same panel. Host june 3, 1993 i want to show you the president s press conference. Would you just give us an idea of what part of her writings you really have trouble with . Yes, i can give you an idea. There was in the michigan law review, there was an article lani analyzed the weakness of the president s remedies available under the Voting Rights act and many of her analyses i agree with. Seemed to be arguing for principles of proportional representation and minority veto as general remedies that i think are inappropriate as general remedies and antidemocratic. Very difficult to defend. Host very difficult to defend. Lani guinier, where were you when the president had the press conference . Guest well, he had a press conference in the evening and then i had an opportunity to speak the following morning, where all of the media came to find out who was this evil witch, and the at that time became much more fairminded and much more realistic. I had spent before president clinton gave that talk had spent about an hour and a half complaining to him what was in the lawyer review article and that time he didnt have any objection to them. There was no argument he made to me personally that explained his subsequent remark. Host that whats same evening as that press conference, that you met with the president in the oval office; and then you drove the department of justice, heard the press conference, when you heard the words difficult to defend, how did you feel . Guest that he was under a lot of pressure to retreat. Host that night he also withdrew your nomination correct . Guest he called me on the phone and aid, im sorry but im going to have to withdraw your nomination and i said okay. And then there was no further comments and i hung up. And then he called back and said you just hung up on me. Why . I said im sorry. I thought you had finished telling me what you had to say. And so then he continued and he said he was and the next day he gave a very friendly talk about how he would give me some money if he could, that he was very fond of me but just couldnt make this move to consider. Some of the arguments i was making which, by the way, are arguments that are derived in part from what happens in germany, and who made the german system with proportional representation . The United States of america after world war ii. So, these concepts are not unusual, and in fact the United States has adopted them for other people. Host you write but the president , like many others who were unfamiliar with the law review style may have simply skimmed the text and failed to appreciate i was describing a particular strategy promoting black faces in high places but not agreeing with many of the basic ideas behind the strategy. What is the law review style . Guest well, the law review style requires, number one, you use a lot of footnotes. It also wants you to articulate all of the other options that could be considered in addition to what it is youre trying to introduce oar to develop further, and although its based on examples, its often much more theoretical, and thus people who are not law professors are often not aware of or able to distinguish the difference between an argument that is scholarly and implementation of a particular set of assumptions that havent really been developed. Host did you ever get the chance to publicly testify . On your nomination to be assistant attorney general guest yes. I got that opportunity through the media, not through the Justice Department or through the other branches of congress. Host would you have liked to have testified before the guest yes. I was looking forward to it. I mean, i wasnt as upset about let me put it in the affirmative. I was eager to play a role in the Clinton Administration at the beginning of the administration. I had been at the Justice Department in the Civil Rights Division in the late 1970s, and knew a lot about the Civil Rights Division because id been there for four years. So i felt very comfortable with that nomination. But on the other hand i had a great job at the university of Pennsylvania Law School. I enjoyed teaching. I enjoyed writing and explore something ideas, so what offended me was not the fact that the nomination was withdrawn, but the way in which it was withdrawn, and the absence of any articulation of the substance of my comments. It was just trying to create an image of me that was apparently scary enough that no politician would want to touch base with me or even touch me. Host so, professor guinier, if you had gotten in front of the Senate Judiciary committee and a republican senator asked you do you believe in quotas what your answer have been . Guest snow. I never articulated a i was called the quota queen but there was no basis for this because i wasnt arguing about quotas. I was arguing about the allocation of power in a way that respected the citizens of the United States, and i wasnt saying you had to have a particular amount of white people or black people or latinos or asianamericans. I was talking bat fairer system of allowing citizens to have larger voice in the election of and the and operation of our senators or of our congressmen or women, or of the people who actually in the states the governor the representatives there, that there were other ways of ensuring that the citizens of the United States were playing a significant role in determining what the responsibility was of elected officials and whether the elected officials were in touch with the citizens themselves and representing the citizens themselves rather than an ideology or some other identity that the elected officials had almost complete management and power over and the citizens themselves were in some ways very much ignored, except to come to the ballot box and elect a. B. , c. , d. They werent in a position to make decision or influence decisions being made because we have a sim of olex a system of election was that created in the 18th century. Were now in the 21st century and the idea that were stuck with what people in the 18th 18th or 19th century were doing, is ridiculous as far as im concerned, because they didnt have computers they didnt have cars. There are lots of ways in which citizens have could have a lot more influence and opportunity in the democratic processes of the United States. Host what do you think of majority rule . 51 determining who gets to rule. Guest well, theres, im sure certain circumstances where 51 versus 49 makes sense. The question is, is that the way it should always be . And the answer in my view is, no. In fact if you look at germany or look at south africa or look at australia, there are lots of other countries, lots of other ways that ensuring the citizens are making decisionsnot the corporations subsidizing the individual who then gets to draw lines to make sure he or she gets reelected and the whole procedure becomes foreign to most citizens and potential voters. Host professor, one of the theme friday a lot of your books is the Voting Rights act something were talking about now in 2015 as well. What are the strengths and weaknesses in your view of the Voting Rights act . Guest which Voting Rights act . Host i guess you can take that wherever you want. Guest the current Voting Rights act is without a lot of its strength. So its difficult to discuss it in in fact i just had dinner last night with somebody who was in the Voting Rights act was in the Voting Rights division of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, and she said that once they killed section 5 it was very little left for people who had been working very hard in the Voting Rights section to have something still to do. So in a way its giving more and more power to the states to determine what the election perhaps coat protocol us even with regard to federal elections, not just with regard to state elections. Host what is section 5 . Guest section 5 was, past tense, a section of the Voting Rights act that covered a certain number of states because of the ways in which they had behaved in the previous 75, 80, 100 years, in terms of the allocation of the opportunity or not just the allocation but the commitment to ensuring that the citizens of the United States and the citizens of that state should have a genuine opportunity to influence the decisions of the people who are ultimately elected and we have a system in the United States in which the allocation of representatives positions is done by the representatives who are already in power, and they draw districts that look very strange, and they draw districts that put people that they dont want in their particular district, out of it, and they look they create districts in which they are pretty much guaranteed to win or at least that Political Party is going guarantee to win, and so its a way of quieting the citizenry when in fact in a democracy, the people that you want to speak out are the citizens themselves not simply the people who get elected and then ignore the concerns of other people because theyre not in their district or because theyve drawn a district that has people who are in the district but have no allies. Host before we move on to your other writings, another topics how did that period of time, april through june of 1993 change you change your life . Guest well, it changed my life in, i would say very good ways. I got to write a number of books and i got to write books that people were willing to read, so that was an opportunity. It also i guess gave me more over an opportunity to speak people, get people engaged in the conversation. This us not just. What academics think. Its what much more important what the citizens themselves think, and very few people are willing to challenge the way in which we divide up power in this country, because were stuck on what the Founding Fathers did in the 1700s and the Founding Fathers were people, like George WashingtonThomas Jefferson, who owned slaves. You have the Founding Fathers determining where the rest of the countrys life how to allocation power and how to determine who represents whom. Host lift every voice. Where does that term come from. Guest from a song lift every voice and sing. A song that is very important in the black community. Host why . Guest because i think the black community is its great strength is its sense of community, and it has a sent of community, unfortunately, in terms of what makes it a community is this feeling of exodus, the feeling that blacks have not been respected, the feeling that slavery dominated the United States and really punished black people in ways that are still being felt 200 years later under 50 years late 150 years later. So i think for at least in terms of my experience especially as a litigator when i was working for the naacp Legal Defense fund, that theres a tremendous sense of community in the black domains of a particular state or a particular city, but theres also an interest in not just improving life for black people but theres an interest in making things more fair for all people. And so one of the potential opportunities or options that have not in my view been taken advantage of or developed is to find ways to encourage poor blacks blacks and poor whites whites and poor latinos and just poor people generally to Work Together to think about a fairer way of incorporating their views into the political process. Right now we have corporations determining who gets elected rather than the population determining who even has the money to run for office much less win. Host one more quote from lift every voice. This could apply today, and if you could expound on this. Certainly, youite no one had prepared me for a sound bite litmus test for public service. Guest that seems to speak for itself. But what i was saying is the media comes in and they put a name on you or put a position on you, and then thats the end of the conversation. I dont mind people challenging my views but i would like ran opportunity to respond. Host lani guinier, professor at harvard currently. How long have you been at harvard . Guest since 1998. Host why did you move to harvard from u penn. Guest this is a difficult decision. I vert much enjoyed working at the university of Pennsylvania Law School ahead. A colleague who we cotaught a class together. But it was several reasons why harvard was appealings. Number one, it was something that was challenging the university for a long time and that is they didnt have any black women working at the law school and very few black people working at the university. Its an irony because not only did i attend radcliffe which became port of harvard, but my father had gone to Harvard College in 1929, and he had applied to the college. He had been accepted, and then when he showed up at the school they were appalled because he failed to submit a photograph with his application, and so they refused him any space in the dormitory. They the students wouldnt talk to him. I was a terrible experience. The first person to talk to him was ralph bunch who was there as a graduate student, and ralph bunch directed him to other places like in the kitchens of the dormitories. Thats where my father could feel comfortable. So i had to and of course he then told me how proud he was when i was admitted to harvard but also the challenges of being at a place where you have a lot of people who come from much more elite, much more important or at least well supported families but so there was a sense and he left harvard after two years. So this is during the depression and he could no longer afford it and they wouldnt let him live in the dormitory, et cetera. So my going to harvard applying and going, was something that i think i felt as a tribute to my dad. And then host you were what did he do after two years of harvard . Guest he went to new york. He had been done very well in high school. He was the valedictorian in his class. And he went to Boston English high school. He had been the editor in chief of his Student Newspaper at the high sc