Yale Law School and postgraduate studies
Rodham then entered Yale Law School. There she served on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action.[39] During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center,[4
![0]](/styles/default/xenforo/NTemojis/alien.gif "Alien 0]")
learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).[41][42] She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale–New Haven Hospital[41] and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free legal advice for the poor.[4
In the summer of 1970 she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. There she researched migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education.[43] Edelman later became a significant mentor.[44] Rodham was recruited by political advisor Anne Wexler to work on the 1970 campaign of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey, with Rodham later crediting Wexler with providing her first job in politics.[45]
In the late spring of 1971 she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale. That summer she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.[46] The firm was well known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members);[46] Rodham worked on child custody and other cases.[nb 3] Clinton canceled his original summer plans in order to live with her in California;[5
the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school.[47] The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.[51] She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973,[32] having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton.[52] He first proposed marriage to her following graduation but she declined, uncertain if she wanted to tie her future to his.[52]
Rodham began a year of postgraduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center.[53] Her first scholarly article, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973.[54] Discussing the new children's rights movement, it stated that "child citizens" were "powerless individuals"[55] and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but that instead courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis.[56] The article became frequently cited in the field.[57]
From the East Coast to Arkansas
During her postgraduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for Edelman's newly founded Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts,[58] and as a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children.[59] In 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal.[6
Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard W. Nussbaum,[41] Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for impeachment.[6
The committee's work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.[6
By then, Rodham was viewed as someone with a bright political future: Democratic political organizer and consultant Betsey Wright had moved from Texas to Washington the previous year to help guide her career,[61] and Wright thought Rodham had the potential to become a future senator or president.[62] Meanwhile, Clinton had repeatedly asked Rodham to marry him and she continued to demur.[63] After failing the District of Columbia bar exam[64] and passing the Arkansas exam, Rodham came to a key decision. As she later wrote, "I chose to follow my heart instead of my head".[65] She thus followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, rather than staying in Washington, where career prospects were brighter. He was then teaching law and running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in his home state. In August 1974, Rodham moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and became one of only two female faculty members in the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.[66][67]
Early Arkansas years
At the university, Rodham gave classes in criminal law, where she was considered a rigorous teacher and tough grader.[68] She became the first director of a new legal aid clinic at the school, securing support from the local bar association and gaining federal funding.[69] Among her cases was one where she was obliged by request of the court to serve as defense counsel to a man accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl; she put on an effective defense that led to his pleading guilty to a much lesser charge.[7
(Decades later, the woman involved said that the defense counsel had put her "through hell" during the legal process; Hillary has said it was a "terrible case").[7
During her time in Fayetteville, Rodham and several other women founded the city's first rape crisis center.[69] Rodham still harbored doubts about marriage, concerned that her separate identity would be lost and that her accomplishments would be viewed in the light of someone else's.[71]
Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975, and Hillary finally agreed to marry Bill.[72] Their wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in a Methodist ceremony in their living room.[73] A story about the marriage in the Arkansas Gazette indicated that she was retaining the name Hillary Rodham.[73][74] The motivation was to keep the couple's professional lives separate and avoid apparent conflicts of interest and because, as she told a friend at the time, "it showed that I was still me."[75] The decision did upset both their mothers.[76] Bill Clinton had lost the congressional race in 1974, but in November 1976 was elected Arkansas Attorney General, and so the couple moved to the state capital of Little Rock.[77] There, in February 1977, Rodham joined the venerable Rose Law Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence.[78] She specialized in patent infringement and intellectual property law[39] while also working pro bono in child advocacy;[79] she rarely performed litigation work in court.[8
Rodham maintained her interest in children's law and family policy, publishing the scholarly articles "Children's Policies: Abandonment and Neglect" in 1977[81] and "Children's Rights: A Legal Perspective" in 1979.[82] The latter continued her argument that children's legal competence depended upon their age and other circumstances and that in serious medical rights cases, judicial intervention was sometimes warranted.[56] An American Bar Association chair later said, "Her articles were important, not because they were radically new but because they helped formulate something that had been inchoate."[56] Historian Garry Wills would later describe her as "one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades",[83] while conservatives said her theories would usurp traditional parental authority,[84] would allow children to file frivolous lawsuits against their parents,[56] and exemplified legal "crit" theory run amok.[85]
Small, one-story brick-faced house with small yard in front
Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton lived in this 980-square-foot (91 m2) house in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Little Rock from 1977 to 1979 while he was Arkansas Attorney General.[86]
In 1977, Rodham cofounded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children's Defense Fund.[39][87] Later that year, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had been the 1976 campaign director of field operations in Indiana)[88] appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation,[89] and she served in that capacity from 1978 until the end of 1981.[9
From mid-1978 to mid-1980,[nb 4] she was the chair of that board, the first woman to do so.[91] During her time as chair, funding for the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million; subsequently she successfully fought President Ronald Reagan's attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.[79]
Following her husband's November 1978 election as Governor of Arkansas, Rodham became First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979, her title for twelve years (1979–81, 1983–92). Clinton appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee the same year,[92] where she secured federal funds to expand medical facilities in Arkansas's poorest areas without affecting doctors' fees.[93]
In 1979, Rodham became the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm.[94] From 1978 until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than that of her husband.[95] During 1978 and 1979, while looking to supplement their income, Rodham engaged in the trading of cattle futures contracts;[96] an initial $1,000 investment generated nearly $100,000 when she stopped trading after ten months.[97] The couple also began their ill-fated investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate venture with Jim and Susan McDougal at this time.[96] Both of these became subjects of controversy in the 1990s.
On February 27, 1980, Rodham gave birth to their daughter Chelsea. In November 1980, Bill Clinton was defeated in his bid for re-election.[98]
