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Lani Guinier is best known as the first African-American woman to make tenure at the prestigious Harvard Law School. Today, Ms. Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at the institution, and has devoted much of her career to a variety of causes and how they relate with the laws of the land. But she is also remembered for the 1993 controversy that derailed her nomination to a high-ranking federal position.

Guinier was born April 19, 1950 in New York City to a Black Panamanian father, Ewart Guinier, who was raised in Jamaica, and a White Jewish mother, Eugenia Paprin. Mr. Guinier was one of the first two Black students admitted into Harvard College in 1929. He eventually had to drop out of the school, but returned there as a professor in the late ’60’s.

Guinier graduated from Radcliffe College in 1971, and Yale Law School. She was a clerk…