RIP: Lani Guinier, 71.

We were saddened to read this morning of the death of Lani Guinier. She was a leftist law professor at Harvard specializing in voting rights. We didn’t know her well. In the 1990s, we played a glancing role in stoking the controversy that led President Clinton to pull her nomination to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. Yet we eventually tried to dial her into the debate on charter revision at New York.

The controversy over Guinier’s nomination to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division erupted in 1993. It was ignited by a story by David Twersky in the Forward, which we were then editing. It reported on writings by Guinier suggesting that the Constitution required the election of minorities to public office. The Wall Street Journal summed her up in a now-famous headline “Quota Queen.”

The Forward argued that Guinier deserved a hearing in the Senate. In the event, though, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, one Joseph Biden, doomed her candidacy, saying that if she tried to defend her views, she wouldn’t have a shot. Mr. Clinton soon withdrew her nomination. Guinier, who’d been teaching law at Penn, won a plum position at Harvard Law School.

Read the whole thing.