Soon Hillary was at the forefront of legal campaigns to protect children and represent those too poor to pay a lawyer. She helped shape legal aid clinics, researched child abuse and neglect, and represented those who had been assaulted or abused. As she wrote in Living History, her work on behalf of abuse victims “went hand-in-hand with my assignments at the New Haven Legal Services office,” as both stemmed from her realization “that what I wanted to do with the law was to give a voice to [those] who were not being heard.”
The legal aid system was haphazard and undefined. Even though the 6th Amendment granted criminal defendants in federal cases the right “to have the assistance of counsel,” it took until the 1930s for indigent defendants in federal cases to secure counsel, and another 30 years for the Supreme Court to apply that right to indigents charged in state felony cases. Even then the Court left many key questions about legal aid unanswered. The demand for legal aid lawyers swamped existing legal pools.
Hillary spent her years after law school tackling both these challenges. In 1973, she went to work at the newly formed Children’s Defense Fund, the country’s leading child advocacy organization. After moving to Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1974, she taught criminal procedure at the law school and ran its legal aid clinic.