Tributes

Eulogy for Lani Guinier

In a world where the very concept of truth is at stake, let us affirm a simple truth. Lani Guinier was and will remain a historic figure in American law and life. When she did what she loved best, when she taught, her voice and her delicate and expressive hands shook the very foundations of democracy in the hope of rousing it to be its truest self. But equally, Lani was a scholar, engaged in thinking, debating, and learning with pure joy as she cultivated her maverick positions with tough-minded analysis.

These past few years, as she slipped away have also been years in which our dreams have been deferred. It’s as if the world is telling us: Watch out. This is how it’s going to be without Lani. But these same few years have also been years to reflect on the gifts that my friend gave to me to prepare me for exactly such a moment. It will come as no surprise that Lani always offered an unvarnished assessment of the truth; she saw the cracks when they were but the finest first lines, she pointed out the canaries fallen in the shadows. Lani worked close to the throb of democracy – representation, the right to vote, the meaning of merit, what participation means, no, what real participation means. All of these and more were Lani’s life’s work, and each of these she applied in the service of a single, cherished ideal – that of justice. Of equal justice. Of equal justice for all.

This towering presence in American law was also my colleague and friend. I met Lani Guinier in a most remarkable way, and it took me a while to understand why she delighted in the story of how we met. More than 20 years ago, soon after I had arrived from Yale, a neuroscientist by the name of Adele Diamond whom I had met briefly wrote to ask if I might come to dinner to meet a couple of other scholars at Harvard. At that dinner for four, I met Lani Guinier and Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot. As the dinner unfolded, it emerged that Adele, who was a scientist and from a secular, east-coast Jewish family had married a Mormon man and converted. Given my bewilderment about Mormonism, I tried to disengage from that conversation, instead looking to engage with Professor Lightfoot who seemed to know an awful lot about Maker’s Mark, an infinitely preferable topic to religious conversion. But not Lani! With laser focus, she posed dozens of gentle but probing questions to Adele and drew out from her remarkable stories of social support and kindness among fellow Mormons, a duty to share and explicit sponsorship commitments that Adele described as nourishing and even lifesaving. Lani was fascinated in a way in which only a truly unprejudiced person can be. She was intrigued by the social contract, somehow seeing in this person-to-person, family-to-family connection and care to be a model for democracy itself.

So, you see what I mean about Lani? Nothing got in the way of her looking for ways to create community. Soon after, Adele left Boston and I didn’t see Sarah again. But Lani and I sat in the parking lot for a long while after that dinner lost in conversation, in our discovery of each other. Harvard is not all bad, I told myself. There’s Lani Guinier.

At the heart of our friendship was of course our work, the parallel paths we were walking, she in the law, me in science. Among my surprises was that unlike many scholars in her field, Lani was drawn to scientific analysis, viewing experimental evidence as a source of input and constraint on her own theorizing. I was struck by how swiftly she would get to the heart of complex experiments and how her eyes would sparkle when she recognized its societal implications. Lani also dragged me to places I didn’t want to go to, like yoga classes. And once, in spite of my resistance, she persuaded me to speak at a conference assessing the Brown decision in the 50th year of its passing. There, she managed to obtain twice as much speaking time for me than the person I was pitted against, an icon of the conservative movement, who was justifiably irate, but whose feelings Lani tried to soothe and only made worse by saying "but Mahzarin needs more time because she has data."

I am ever grateful for these 20 years of friendship that also included our spouses, Nolan and Bhaskar, always updates on Niko, great amounts of good food, a lot of laughter, and much silliness. In this moment of celebrating her life, I want us to remember a dialectic that defined Lani at her core. Yes, she was unflinching in calling out wrongs, she knew as Langston Hughes did, what it meant for dreams to be deferred. But what kept me in awe of Lani was her absolute and equal sense of possibility, of what lay beyond the struggle. And so, to these concluding passages I go from a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough, Say not the struggle nought availeth, in which the poet first speaks about life’s constant defeats, the feeling that “the labor and wounds are in vain and that as things have been, they remain.” But it is these concluding stanzas that capture my friend’s eternal hope of a purposeful struggle:

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright!