Lift Every Voice; Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a Strong New Vision of Social Justice

25 cm. 336 pages. Sources. Index. Inscribed and dated by the author on the title page. Minor DJ wear and soiling. Lani Guinier (born April 19, 1950) is an American civil rights theorist. She is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship there. Guinier's work includes professional responsibilities of public lawyers, the relationship between democracy and the law, the role of race and gender in the political process, college admissions, and affirmative action. Guinier is probably best known as President Bill Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in April 1993.[ President Clinton withdrew his nomination in June 1993, following a wave of negative press that was brought on by her controversial writings, some of which even Clinton himself called "anti-democratic" and "very difficult to defend". Derived from a Kirkus review: Legal scholar Guinier describes the experience that made her famous and the lessons she learned from it. Guinier insists in this half-autobiography, half-treatise that Clinton actually did her a favor, despite her anger over the way she was treated by hostile critics, a press too lazy to verify attacks levied against her, and a president who had once been her friend. Guinier describes how she has relearned lessons from early in her career as a crusading lawyer for the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, that lasting social change comes from the bottom up, from an energized citizenry, rather than from top-down fiats from legislators or administration bureaucrats. Guinier repeatedly hits readers over the head with lectures on participatory democracy and building from the grassroots. She defends her belief in proportional representation, which so outraged right-wing pundits in 1993. Guinier is an original and stimulating thinker whose ideas may now get a broader and fairer airing.