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Nov. 7, 2014 — Lani Guinier, a leading advocate for political reform and the first woman of color to be appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School, will speak at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 14 in Ford Chapel at Allegheny College. The presentation is free and open to the public.

Guinier’s talk is a keynote presentation in the college’s Year of Voting Rights and Democratic Participation, which celebrates the 50th anniversary in 2015 of the Voting Rights Act and explores the state of civil rights, broadly defined, in the world today. The Year of Voting Rights and Democratic Participation is the academic centerpiece of the college’s bicentennial celebration.

The author of numerous articles on democratic theory, political representation, educational equity and issues of race and gender, Guinier was first introduced to the public in 1993, when President Clinton nominated her to be the first black woman to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

She is the author of “Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice”; “The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy”; “The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy”; and, with Susan Sturm, “Who’s Qualified? A New Democracy Forum on the Future of Affirmative Action.” Her newest book, “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America,” will be published by Beacon Press in 2015.

In addition to her work as Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Guinier is a visiting professor at Columbia Law School.

More information on Year of Voting Rights and Democratic Participation events at Allegheny College can be found at www.allegheny.edu/200.