Former assistant counsel to the naacp Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the author of six books. How did professor lani guinier come how did he become known . Guest how long do you have . 1993 and by june of 1993 i was no longer nominated. Its an intense be but short period of time intense but short period of time so your question, how long was i being considered, you could say two months, but then before they mom nailed me nominated me, there was also some discussion of it, im sure. So depends on your math. Host who first used that, that term, quota queen . You for excuse that term . Guest i dont know who first used the term. It was First Published in the wall street journal but i cant tell you who came up with the term. I think theyve adjust have been somebody early on. Host was it a fair term . Guest no. I wasnt the queen. I guess somebody liked the fact there two qs. I didnt relate to the concept. Host where did they give that term . From your lot riding . In leading quota queen . Somebody made up the term and passed it on to someone in the wall street journal. Host in your 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. Fuelled by cartoonish characters by rightwing advocates of the media soon defined me. I kept waiting for the white house to put together a strategy. Meanwhile the right wing had the field to itself. Guest that is true. Host you go on to write that quota queen completed three rationalized images, welfare, quote ups and then married, loud demanding black women. It became part of an organized campaign that continues still to convert the 1960s slogan for unqualified and undeserving black people. The right wing story was i wanted more black, less for whites by any means necessary including the destruction of democracy. Quota queen made any further communication superfluid. Announced my agenda loud and clear, an imperious black woman who did not know her place. I would do to whites with centuries of whites had done to blacks. It speaks for itself. Guest i dont know that i have anything to add. That was written in a way that reflected what happened a year or two were talking about something that happened 22 years ago. I am not sure what the value is in repeating what they were doing. They speak for themselves in their terminology. Precociousness, this assumption that they can attack people based on nonsense but as long as they keep tracking them somehow the challenge will become like a tsunami and you get caught up in it. You need to know how to swim but you also have to know how to exit. Host back to your book lift every voice turning a civil rights setback into a new vision of social justice 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 a rival, we believed in him bill clinton his passion for justice. How did you get to know the president and mrs. Clinton . Guest i went to Yale Law School and they were there. They were helpful to me because when i was at the law school i was competing, you get to do a fake litigation ended . Good job you move to the next level. They played a role in who determines to be a participant in the union and although there was another student who was challenging the they were more sympathetic to the arguments i was making and as a result i participated in the finals. Later on i graduated from law school. It was a program, an annual program in South Carolina right off the coast during the period between december and january or the first part of january. They both, hillary and bill were at that retreat and my husband his daughter and i also came to the retreat and that is where i got to know the little better because hillary and i were on the same panel. Host june 3rd, 1993, wants to show you a little of the president s press conference. Give us an idea of what part of the riding you have trouble with. I will give you an idea. In the michigan law review. Lani guinier analyze the weaknesses of the voting remedies in the voting analysis act and i agree with that but seemed to be arguing for proportional representation and minority retail as general remedies, and antidemocratic, very difficult to defend. Host very difficult to defend. Where were you when the president had that press conference . He had a press conference in the evening and i had an opportunity to speak the following morning when all the media came in to find out who was this evil which and at that time the news became much more fair minded and realistic. I had spent an hour and a half explaining to him what was in the law review articles and at that time he didnt have any objection to them. There was no argument he made to me personally that explained his subsequent remarks. Host the same evening as the press conference when you met the president in the oval office in you drove the department of justice, heard the press conference and heard the word is difficult to defend how did you feel . Guest he was under a lot of pressure to retreat. And withdrew your motivation. The call me up and said i am sorry, i am going to have to withdraw your nomination and i said ok and then there was no further comment so i hung up and he called back and said you just hung up on me . I said i am sorry. I thought you had finished telling me what you had to say and so he continued and the next day he gave a very friendly talk about how he would give me some money if he could, he was very fond of me but couldnt make this move to consider. Some of the arguments i was making which by the way our arguments derived in part from what happens in germany and who made the german system . The United States of america after world war ii so these concepts are not unusual in fact the United States has adopted them for other people. Host you write the president , like many others who are unfamiliar with the law review style may have simply skin the text and failed to appreciate that 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 the law review style requires number one that you review 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 you are trying to introduce or develop further. And although it is based on example it is 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 falling and implementation of a particular set of functions that havent really been developed. Did you ever get a chance to publicly testify . On your nomination to be assistant attorney general . Guest i got that opportunity through the media, not the Justice Department or the other branches of congress. Host would you like to have testified . I was looking forward to it. 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 i knew a lot about the Civil Rights Division because i had been there for four years so i felt very comfortable with that nomination. On the other hand i had a great job at the university of Pennsylvania Law School. I enjoyed teaching. I enjoyed riding and exploring the ideas so what offended me was not the fact that the nomination was withdrawn but the way in which 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 to touch base with me or even touched me. Host if you had done in front of the Senate Judiciary committee and a republican senator looked at you and said do you believe in quote as . What would your answer have been . Guest i never articulated. I was called the quota queen but i was not arguing about quotas. The allocation of power in ways that respected the citizens of the United States. White people of black people or latinos or Asian Americans but a fairer system of allowing citizens who have a larger voice in the election of and operation of our senators or congressman or women or the people who actually are in the states, the governor, the represented to their but 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 unelected 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 comment and the citizens themselves in some ways very much ignored except to come to the ballot box and elect a, b, c or d. They were not in a position of making decisions that were being made, we have a system of elections created in the 18thcentury. We are now in the 21st century. The idea that we are stuck with people in the eighteenth or Nineteenth Century were doing is ridiculous as far as i am concerned because they didnt have computers or cars. There are lots of ways in which citizens have or 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 determine who gets to rule . I am sure certain circumstances where 51 versus 49 makes sense. The question, is that the way it should always be . The answer in my view is no. If you go around and look at germany or south africa or australia there are lots of other ways of ensuring citizens are making decisions, not the corporations that i 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 one of the themes and a lot of your books is the Voting Rights act, something we are talking about in 2015 as well. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Voting Rights act . You can take that wherever you want. Guest the Voting Rights act is without a lot of it strength. It is difficult 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 once they killed section 5 there was carried left for people who had been working hard in the Voting Rights section to have something still to do. More power to the states to determine what the election protocol is even with regard to federal elections not just in regard to state elections. Host what is section 5 . Guest section 5 a section of the Voting Rights act that coverage a certain number of states because in the ways in which they behaved in the previous 75, 80, 100 years in terms of the allocation of the opportunity not just the allocation but the commitment to insuring the citizens of the United States and the citizens of that state a genuine opportunity to influence decisions of the people who are ultimately elected. We have a system in the United States in which the allocation of representative 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 create districts in which they are pretty much guaranteed to win or at least that Political Party is going to guarantee to win and it is a way of quieting the citizenry when in fact in a democracy the people you want to speak out on the citizens themselves, not simply the people who get elected and then ignore the concerns of other people because they are not in their district or they have drawn a district that has people in the district but they have no allies. Host before we move on to your other writings, another topic. How did that period of time, april through june of 1993 change you, change your life . Guest a changed my life in very good way is. I got to write a number of books and got to write books that people were willing to read so that was an opportunity and also more of an opportunity to speak to people to get engaged, not just what academics in many ways much more important very few people are willing to challenge the way in which we divide up power in this country because we are stuck on what the Founding Fathers did in the 1700s and the Founding Fathers were people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson the Founding Fathers determining what the rest of the country is like, how to allocate power and determine who represents whom. Host lift every voice, where does that term come from . Guest it is a song that is very important black community. The black community is its great strength is its sense of community. It has a sense of community in terms of what makes it the community is the feeling blacks have not been respected. The feeling that slavery dominated the United States and punished black people in ways that are still being felt 200 years later, 50 years later. I fink for in terms of my experience as a litigator when i was working for the naacp it is a tremendous sense of community in the domain of a particular state or city that there is also interested in not just improving life for black people but in making things more fair for all people. One of the potential opportunities or options that have not in my view been taken advantage of war developed is find ways to encourage poor blacks and whites and latinos and poor people generally to Work Together to think about a fair way of incorporating their views in the political process. Right now we have corporations determining who gets elected rather than the population determining who has the money to run for office much less win. Host one more quote from lift every voice turning a civil rights setback into a new vision of social justice and if you discount on this, certainly, you write, 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 for a position on you and that is the end of the conversation. I dont mind people challenging my views but i would like an opportunity to respond. Host lani guinier, professor at harvard. How long have you been at harvard . Guest since 1998. Host why did you move to harvard . Guest it was a difficult decision. I pretty much enjoyed working at the university of Pennsylvania Law School. I have a colleague, we taught a class together. There were several reasons why harvard was appealing. Number one it was challenging the university for a long time. They didnt have any black women working at the law school and very few black people working at the university. It is an irony because not only did i attend what became part of harvard but my father had gone to Harvard College in 1929 and he had applied to the college. He had been accepted and 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 in the dormitory and ralph bunche who was there as a graduate student. In the dormitories where my father could feel comfortable. 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, more important, or supported families. He left harvard. He could no longer afford it. My going to harvard, applying and going, i felt as a tribute to my dad. Host what did he do after two years of harvard . Guest he went to new york. He was valid victorian in his class and Boston English high school, he had been editorinchief of student newspaper, a group that brought all the students, editors of their High School Journal to to recruit people who are interested in journalism to come to the New York Times. Had left harvard, came to them in that room when you were inviting us. The second thing, confidence with him in the elevator and editor of the New York Times, they would hire him as elevator operator. That is how i got to work in the New York Times. Read the New York Times each day from cover to cover. Then he went to school, at city college. And from there, graduated from city college and ultimately wind to law school but that was several decades, world war ii. Host you were raised in new york city. To was your mother . Guest who was my mother . What was her name . Host tell us about her. Guest my mom was the daughter of jewish immigrants who came to the United States. My grandmother was from poland in a but when she was 8 years old. My grandfather, my mothers father came to canada and russia, ought to the United States. They set up a restaurant, two children, she was 6 years old, taking care for 4yearold brother. At some point she