Carol Lani Guinier, one of the nation’s foremost scholars on race and civil rights and a professor at Penn’s Law School (today the Carey Law School) from 1988 to 1998, passed away on January 7 from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. She was 71.

Born in New York City to activist parents, Ms. Guinier graduated third in her high school class of more than 1,400 students. She then attended Radcliffe, a women’s college that has since merged with Harvard, and graduated in 1971. She then earned a JD from Yale Law School in 1974. After a clerkship for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Damon J. Keith (then chief judge of the Eastern District of Michigan), Ms. Guinier joined the Justice Department in 1977 during the Carter administration and worked in the Civil Rights Division. In 1981, Ms. Guinier joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, heading the voting rights litigation and legislative program. Among the cases she argued and won was a North Carolina case (Thornburg v. Gingles) that helped define the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act. She also brought a case in 1983 naming Arkansas Governor Clinton as defendant; it was settled out of court with a consent decree, liberalizing election laws. During her time at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Ms. Guinier reportedly won 31 of the 32 cases she argued.

In 1988, Ms. Guinier joined Penn’s faculty as an associate professor of law, and four years later she was promoted to professor. She was an eminent faculty member at Penn, serving on the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and earning Penn Law’s 1994 Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence. In 1996, Ms. Guinier received an honorary degree from Swarthmore College (Almanac May 21/28, 1996). From 1996 to 1997, she served on Penn’s National Commission on Society, Culture, and Community, which convened scholars from across the U.S. to compare notes on contemporary societal problems. In 1998, Ms. Guinier received Penn Law’s Robert E. Davies award for “...outstanding contributions to her profession, her university and her community for her special efforts to promote equal opportunities for women and for minority populations” (Almanac April 28, 1998). An affiliate of Penn’s Women’s Studies Program, Ms. Guinier became well known in women’s education for her studies of differences in the way women and men learn.

Ms. Guinier made history in 1993 when she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights (Almanac May 4, 1993). Conservative activists who opposed her nomination seized on Ms. Guinier’s articles in law journals, which dismissed winner-take-all voting as a system that discredited the needs of minorities and recommended proportional voting in its place and called for Black candidates to demonstrate a “cultural and psychological view of group solidarity.” Those conservatives tried to discredit Ms. Guinier as a radical reformer, and bowing to political pressure, President Clinton withdrew Ms. Guinier’s nomination, a move that outraged civil rights activists.

After these events, Ms. Guinier returned to teaching, and in 1998, she left Penn Law to become the first tenured Black female professor at Harvard Law School. There, she became one of the most respected civil rights scholars in the country. Sherrilyn Ifill, current president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, called Ms. Guinier “easily the most intellectually powerful, towering figure I had ever met.” Ms. Guinier wrote several books detailing her research, including The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (1994), Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into New Vision of Social Justice (1998); and The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (2015). Thanks to her publications and her role in politics, she made many media appearances and was a highly-regarded public speaker.

Ms. Guinier is survived by her husband, lawyer and professor Nolan Bowie; their son, Nikolas Bowie; a stepdaughter, Dana Rice; three sisters; and a granddaughter.