To me, a lawyer's responsibility to do public service can be summarized quite simply: to whom much is given, much is expected. And much is given to us who have had the opportunity to get a good education, get a law-school education, work in a law firm, make an adequate or better living and enjoy the fruits of the great education. We owe something back to the society that made it possible.

I see considerable overlap in the characteristics that lead a person to the practice of law and those that lead a person to be involved in civic activity. These activities share a major ingredient—the challenge of the planning and follow-through required to get a desired result. In both cases, the process is largely dependent upon persuading others to accept the wisdom of a plan and organizing a plan that works within the rules and traditions that govern the activity.

U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY)...

But the truth is my decision to attend law school was by no means assured. I felt pulled in a million different directions. My graduating class at Wellesley was the class of 1969, a time of great change and anguish for America. My time as an undergraduate coincided with years of cultural tumult, controversy, and tragedy, including the escalation of the Vietnam War, the withdrawal of President Johnson from the presidential race and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

All you had to do was turn on a television set to see that there was so much going wrong in America. But in my young and idealistic mind, that meant there were so many different ways a young person like me could make something right. There was a spirit of civic involvement—of civic action—that permeated the campus and filled me with a sense of possibility, despite the social upheaval that marked the late 1960s.

There was, however, one thing I knew for sure. I wanted to participate in public life as an activist and a citizen. I believed in our country and our democratic institutions—and that you could achieve a lot of good by participating. In the years since, as a lawyer, as First Lady and as senator from New York, that faith has only grown. In the end, the decision to apply and attend law school was for me an expression of that belief: the system can be changed from within.

The law can be an incredible vehicle for social change—and lawyers are at the wheel. I think of Brown v. Board of Education and the Supreme Court cases that would follow, of the Voting Rights Act. In fact, in the Senate, we just renewed the Voting Rights Act, a reminder of the work that remains to ensure that every citizen's constitutional rights are safeguarded. (Alas, the work of public-interest lawyers is never done.)