Lani Guinier

“The experience of women and people of color is the experience of the miner’s canary. . . . The lesson of affirmative action was that the problem is in the canary, and the solution was to fix the canary. I want to move from fixing the canary to fixing the atmosphere in the mines.”

—Harvard law school professor Lani Guinier, whose appointment as head of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice was withdrawn after coming under fire for her views on affirmative action and proportional representation. She delivered a keynote address at the Emory School of Law during Women’s History Month, March 2, 1999.