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<p class="MsoNormal">Dear Colleague,<b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Lani Guinier</b>, the first African-American
woman
tenured professor at Harvard Law School, will launch the Weissman
Center's
Spring semester series, <i>Limits of the Law.<span>
</span></i>Professor Guinier is nationally recognized for her work on
democracy
and the law, affirmative action, and the role of race and gender in the
political process.<span> </span>Her lecture,
"Racial Literacy or Post-Racial Blindness: Where Should the Law Go from
Here?"<i> </i>is scheduled for <b>Wednesday, February 10</b>, at <b>7:30
pm</b> in Gamble Auditorium in the Art Building at Mount Holyoke
College.<span>
</span>Professor Guinier will discuss the subtle and
complex ways that race and laws actually work in the 21<sup>st</sup>
century,
and will offer a new way to think and talk about race.</p>
<p style="margin-right: -9pt;">Before joining the faculty at Harvard,
Lani
Guinier
was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
During
the 1980s, she was head of the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal
Defense
Fund, and served in the Civil Rights Division during the Carter
administration
as special assistant to then-Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days.
Professor
Guinier came to public attention when she was nominated by President
Bill
Clinton in 1993 to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of
Justice,
only to have her name withdrawn without a confirmation hearing.
Professor
Guinier turned that incident into a powerful personal and political
memoir,
<em>Lift
Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social
Justice</em>.
Dean of Yale Law School Anthony Kronman calls <i>Lift Every Voice </i>a
"moving personal testimony, a story of dignity and principle and hope,
from which every reader can take heart." <br>
<br>
While a member of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law
School,
Professor Guinier investigated the experience of women in law school,
leading
to the publication of a book, <em>Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law
School and
Institutional Change</em>. She and her co-authors found that women were
not
graduating with top honors, although women and men came to the school
with
virtually identical credentials. The author of many articles and op-ed
pieces
on democratic theory, political representation, educational equity, and
issues
of race and gender, Professor Guinier has written The <em>Tyranny of
the
Majority</em> (Free Press, 1994) about issues of political
representation;
<i>Who's
Qualified?</i> (Beacon Press, 2001), with Susan Sturm, about moving
beyond
affirmative action to reconsider the ways in which colleges admit all
students;
and <em>The Miner's Canary</em> (Harvard Press, 2002), with Gerald
Torres,
about the experience of people of color as a warning or "canary"
signaling
larger institutional inequities.</p>
<p style="margin-right: -9pt;">We hope your students and colleagues can
join us
for Professor Guinier's public lecture on February 10. <span> </span>A
flyer
announcing the event is attached.<span> </span>For more information
on the
event and the <i>Limits
of the Law </i>spring series, please visit <a
href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/go/limits">www.mtholyoke.edu/go/limits</a>.</p>
<p style="margin-right: -9pt;">Sincerely,</p>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">James Harold<br>
Director, Weissman Center<br>
for Leadership and the Liberal Arts<br>
Associate Professor, Philosophy</span>
<br>
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