Hillary Rodham Clinton (née Hillary Rodham) was born in Chicago, IL in 1947, received her B.A. in political science from Wellesley College in 1969, and obtained her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973. While at Yale, she volunteered with New Haven Legal Services organization, one of the first Ford Foundation “Gray Area” model projects.

After graduating from Yale, Mrs. Clinton interned at the Children’s Defense Fund, which was then known as the Washington Research Project. She had met Marian Wright Edelman, a fellow Yale graduate, during her time in law school.

In 1974, she and several other lawyers, including her classmate William “Bill” Clinton, worked on the President Nixon impeachment staff in Washington, DC. After President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, she followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, where he was teaching at the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayettesville.

In late August of 1974, she began teaching criminal law and managing a legal aid clinic at the law school. Mrs. Clinton’s involvement with the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) started with her submission of a funding application to LSC for the University of Arkansas legal aid program. LSC eventually funded the program and it became the Ozark Legal Services.

In 1975, she was appointed to the Arkansas State Advisory Committee for LSC. President Carter appointed Mrs. Clinton to the LSC Board (she and her husband worked on President Carter’s 1976 campaign)in 1977. She succeeded Roger C. Cramton as Chairperson of the LSC Board in 1978 and served in this capacity until 1981.

During her tenure at the LSC, the budget increased from $96 million to $321 million during the administration of President Gerald Ford. During this period the LSC also oversaw the Delivery Systems Study which analyzed a variety of different systems for the delivery of legal services, and the 1007 (h) study, which was mandated by Congress to research the access problems of particular constituency groups such as Native Americans.