Belleville News-Democrat
Serving Southwestern Illinois
Clinton's years at Yale Law are key to her political development
BY MATT STEARNS
McClatchy Newspapers
Nov. 22, 2007
NEW HAVEN, Conn. --All that Hillary Rodham Clinton would become -- all that inspires her allies and her enemies alike -- emerged during her years roaming the Gothic buildings of Yale Law School. She helped edit a journal that included cartoon police-pigs and that published a self-aggrandizing essay by a Black Panther who'd been convicted of murder. Yet she also helped calm a politically inflamed campus.
She nurtured an interest in using the law to aid the needy -- especially children -- that remains integral to her politics, but which opponents use to pummel her values. She projected an intelligence that impressed many, but that could be cool and intimidating.
Yale was no typical elite law school stamping out high-dollar associates for white-shoe firms. Small, with a class of about 200 -- perhaps 25 of them women -- the school emphasized using the law for social change. It attracted students "interested in a public service career," said Douglas Eakeley, one of Bill Clinton's roommates.
Rodham gained more prominence the second semester of her first year at Yale Law, when it seemed "the whole place was falling apart ... the most intense year in the history of Yale Law School," said Laura Kalman, who wrote "Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations."
Several Black Panthers were on trial for murder in New Haven. The campus, opened to New Left demonstrators associated with the trial, became a circus. Downtown business owners, fearing violence, boarded up their windows. A law library was set afire. The shooting deaths of four student demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio by National Guardsmen further enraged campuses nationwide.........
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