Carol Lani Guinier (/ˈlɑːni ɡwɪˈnɪər/ LAH-nee gwin-EER; April 19, 1950 – January 7, 2022) was an American educator, legal scholar, and civil rights theorist.

Her scholarship covered the 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.

He was forced to drop out in 1931, unable to afford school after he was excluded from financial aid and campus housing, but he ultimately returned to Harvard as a professor and the first chair of the Afro-American Studies Department in 1969.

[9] Guinier said that she wanted to be a civil rights lawyer since she was twelve years old,[10] after she watched on television as Constance Baker Motley helped escort James Meredith, the first black American to enroll in the University of Mississippi.

[12] She was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1981, and after Ronald Reagan took office, she joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) as an assistant counsel, eventually becoming head of its Voting Rights project.

Guinier was dubbed a "quota queen," a phrase first used in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Clint Bolick, a Reagan-era U.S. Justice Department official.

"[19] As one reviewer of her work wrote: "The remedies Guinier advocates for diluted minority voting rights do not include laws that guarantee election outcomes for disadvantaged groups.

Political science and law professor Carol M. Swain argued that Guinier was in favor of "segregating black voters in black-majority districts.

"[26] Guinier, for her part, acknowledged that her writings were often "unclear and subject to vastly different interpretations," but believed that the political attacks had distorted and caricatured her academic philosophies.

Guinier also stated that she did not advocate for any single procedural rule, but rather that all alternatives should be considered in the context of litigation "after the court finds a legal violation.

The process of confirmative action, she said, "ties diversity to the admissions criteria for all students, whatever their race, gender, or ethnic background—including people of color, working-class whites, and even children of privilege.

By linking diversity to merit, Guinier argued that preferential treatment of minority students "confirms the public character and democratic missions of higher-education institutions.

[52][12] In 2007 she delivered the Yale Law School Fowler Harper Lecture, entitled "The Political Representative as Powerful Stranger: Challenges for Democracy.