Marines NEVER Lie, Cheat, or Steal.

(cough)Ollie North(cough)

Another reason she couldn't make it in the Marine Corps. Marine Core Values: Marines NEVER Lie, Cheat, or Steal.

I always thought it was the same with lawyers, except on TV and the movies, but it turns out there are actually Marine JAGs:

Shortly after posting, I thought about this & realized why: the Geneva Conventions.

Every Marine, regardless of primary specialty, is trained as a basic rifle infantryman as well. Since Doctors and Chaplains have specific restrictions about that sort of thing (and JAGs don't), they get 'loaned' by the Navy.

Next came Yale Law School, where Hillary focused on questions about how the law affected children and began her decades of work as an advocate for children and families. As a law student, Hillary represented foster children and parents in family court and worked on some of the earliest studies creating legal standards for identifying and protecting abused children.

Or, per Wikipedia (footnotes omitted):

Rodham then entered Yale Law School, where she served on the Board of Editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action. During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center, 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). She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free advice for the poor. 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, researching migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education; Edelman would become a significant mentor to her.

In the late spring of 1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, who was also a law student at Yale. That summer, she interned on child custody cases at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which 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. Clinton canceled his original summer plans in order to live with her in an apartment in Berkeley, California, later writing, "I told her I'd have the rest of my life for my work and my ambition, but I loved her and I wanted to see if it could work out for us." The romance did develop, and the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school. The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973, having spent an extra year there in order to be with Clinton. Clinton first proposed marriage to her following graduation, but she declined at the time. She began a year of post-graduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center. Her first scholarly article, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973. Discussing the new children's rights movement, it stated that "child citizens" were "powerless individuals" and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but rather courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis. The article became frequently cited in the field.

I guarantee you that if she had so much as a "cum laude" to report, it would be in at least one of these two places. (Wikipedia duly reports that she "graduated with departmental honors in political science" from Wellesley College.) And the Yale Review of Law and Social Action was, at best, a fourth-tier journal that was in existence for only three years; it's not remotely comparable in prestige to either the Yale Law Journal or the Harvard Law Review (the latter of which, Obama was famously the first black president of).

Maybe you, or whoever misled you, were thinking of the Stanford Law School Class of 1953, in which Rehnquist was reportedly #1 and O'Connor was #3? (Even that may be an urban legend, as Stanford says it too didn't announce class-rank determinations.)

What basis do you have for saying that she was at the “top of her class” at Yale?

I read quite some time back, somewhere that I regarded as reputable, that she finished #1 and Bill finished #3 in their class. Could be wrong, though, and haven't been able to verify with a quick Google search.

I've read, however, that the D.C. bar exam, at least at that time, consisted only of the "multistate." I know she did pass the Arkansas bar; most graduates, and especially graduates from a "national" school like Yale, would certainly have taken a bar review course specific to the state whose specific laws they'd need to know for their exam. So maybe she slighted her study for the multistate and the D.C. bar in favor of the state-law specific portions of the Arkansas bar.

I don't think it's a big deal that she flunked the D.C. bar. I think she's plenty smart.

On the other hand, I doubt merely a middle-ranking degree from Yale (if that's what she had; it could have been lower, for all I've been able to tell), with no Yale Law Journal experience, judicial clerkship, or other special credentials, would have gotten her a tenure-track offer at another top law school like Chicago. Obama, by contrast, was offered a tenure-track position at Chicago, and almost certainly could have ended up as a top legal academic if he'd been inclined to go that way.

As far as either's credentials to be president, this isn't a big deal. But I don't think she was at the top of her class, nor that she's ever claimed that.

Harvard doesn't give out class standings directly, but Obama was magna cum laude at Harvard Law.

I've never seen Hillary's degree from Yale Law even described as cum laude, however, and I don't know where in her graduating class her grades put her. She did proceed to flunk the D.C. bar exam, however.

“I remember when we were young, right out of law school, she went down and tried to join the Army and they said ‘Your eyes are so bad, nobody will take you,’”

Actually, the recruiters were trying to be nice. The Army or the Marines do not recruit any individual whose ass and mid-riff bulge presents a target larger than a medium sized tank.

Did she try the Navy, fat floats.

Do the Marines even have lawyers? I know they use Navy personnel for doctors and chaplains…

I always thought it was the same with lawyers, except on TV and the movies, but it turns out there are actually Marine JAGs:

About 400 active-duty Marine judge advocates, most of whom hold the rank of captain, are distributed among all of the Corps’ major stations and posts.

Does anyone really believe that, after graduating Yale at the top of her class, she wanted to join the military? Or that she was so dumb that she thought the way to do that was to go to a recruiting office (where they enlist privates)? Or that, in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam war and the earliest days of the all-volunteer force, they were turning people away by glancing at their glasses?

Well, I highly doubt the entire anecdote - Peace Corps, maybe. But military? Hell no. And the idea that any service would turn down a lawyer (one assumes that's what she would go in to be) because of eyesight anywhere short of legally blind is highly dubious. Do the Marines even have lawyers? I know they use Navy personnel for doctors and chaplains...

That said, given the general lack of familiarity with military recruiting, I wouldn't be at all surprised if even someone with her quaifications thought first of a recruiting office - did Yale even have an ROTC detatchment at that point?

That being said, I think she is Clintoning the truth here.