Lani Guinier and the Dilemmas of American Democracy

Lani Guinier, an experienced voting rights litigator and a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, first came to national attention in the spring of 1993 when President Clinton nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. Labelled a quota queen by the Wall Street Journal, Guinier became the target of a fervent campaign to block her nomination. For several weeks, Guinier\u27s law review articles on voting rights were the focus of a fierce national debate. Politicians and pundits expounded on her publications and spread snippets from her scholarship across the front pages and opinion columns of America\u27s media. Although her writings and ideas received a volume of attention that many academics would die for, the soundbite commentary generated far more heat than light, with selective quotation, tendentious analysis, and ideological and partisan concerns typically crowding out balanced and dispassionate discussion. As the Wall Street Journal\u27s insidious appellation took root, so, too, did the perception of Guinier as an extremist who held views that were off the deep end, out of the mainstream, and alarmingly radical. With a potentially explosive Senate confirmation hearing in the offing, President Clinton abruptly withdrew her nomination. In so doing, the President not only denied her a nationally televised forum in which she could respond to her attackers and defend her views, but added insult to injury by appearing to agree with her critics. Guinier, Clinton stated, seem[s] to be arguing for principles ... that I think inappropriate as general remedies and anti-democratic, [and] very difficult to defend

Cumulative Voting and Single Member Districts in Industrial Organization

In 1993 Bill Clinton nominated Lani Guinier to head the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. Soon after, Guinier\u27s nomination became embroiled in controversy when the media and conservative legislators began to examine her writings on electoral remedies to Voting Rights Act violations. Almost immediately, Lani Guinier became known as the quota queen and her writings were derided as undemocratic and racially preferential. Still smarting from nanny-gate, President Clinton quickly moved to avoid further attacks and withdrew Guinier\u27s nomination. Foremost among the charges raised against Guinier was that her advocation of cumulative voting as an alternative to districting as a remedy for minority voting strength dilution represented an affront to democracy and was designed to unfairly advantage minorities. Unfortunately, the truth was somehow lost in the fury of political maneuvering and press sensationalism

From Gladiators to Problem-Solvers: Connecting Conversations About Women, the Academy, and the Legal Profession

The UHF band between 470-790 MHz, currently occupied by digital ter- restrial TV (DTT) distribution in Europe, is widely regarded as a premium spectrum band for providing mobile coverage. With the exponential increase in wireless data traffic in recent years, there has been growing interests in gaining access to this spectrum band for wireless broadband services. The secondary access in TV White Space is considered as one cost-effective way to reuse the spectrum unoccupied by the primary DTT network. On the other hand, the declining influence of DTT and the converging trends of video con- sumption on TV and mobile platforms are new incentives for the regulator to reconsider the optimal utilization of the UHF broadcast band. The proposal to re-farm the UHF band for a converged content distribution network was born under theses circumstances. This thesis intends to develop a methodology for evaluating the technical performance of these options for utilizing UHF broadcast band and quantify- ing their gains in terms of achievable extra capacity and spectrum savings. For the secondary access in TV white space, our study indicates a considerable po- tential for low power secondary, which is mostly limited by the adjacent chan- nel interference generated from the densely deployed secondary devices due to the cumulative effect of multichannel interference. On the other hand, this potential does not translate directly into capacity for a WiFi-like secondary system based on CSMA/CA protocol, as the network congestion and self- interference within the secondary system has a greater impact on the network throughput than the primary interference constraint. Our study on the cellular content distribution network reveals more po- tential benefits for re-farming the UHF broadcast band and reallocating it for a converged platform. This platform is based on cellular infrastructure and can provide TV service with the same level of quality requirement as DTT by delivering the video content via either broadcast or unicast as the situa- tion dictates. We have developed a resource manage framework to minimize its spectrum requirement for providing TV service and identified a significant amount of spectrum that can be reused by the converged platform to provide extra mobile broadband capacity in urban and sparsely populated rural areas. Overall, we have arrived at the conclusion that the concept of cellular con- tent distribution in a re-farmed UHF band shows a more promising prospect than the secondary access in TV white space in the long run. Nevertheless, low power secondary is still considered as a flexible and low-cost way to exploit the underutilized spectrum in the short term, despite its uncertainty in future availability. On the other hand, the re-farming of UHF broadcast band is a long and difficult regulation process with substantial opposition from the in- cumbent.The results from this study could serve as input for future regulatory decisions on the UHF band allocation and cost-benefit analysis for deploying new systems to access this spectrum band. QC 20140609EU FP7 QUASAREU FP7 METI

Democracy and Dis-Appointment

A Review of The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democrac