board members to be appointed by the president, subject to Senate confirmation. LSC was created by the Legal Services Corporation Act of 1974 (). The LSC Act contains certain rules and restrictions regarding what LSC grantees can do. The initial budget was set at $90 million. Naming and confirmation of the first LSC board was delayed by inaction and opposition, but by July 1975, President Gerald R. Ford had named and the Senate had approved the first board, with Cornell University Law School Dean Roger Conant Cramton as its first chair. South Dakota legal services lawyer ad prosector Bill Janklow was another member of the initial board. Thomas Ehrlich, at the time the dean of Stanford Law School, became the LSC's first president. Debate existed from the start among the board members as to whether LSC's role should be the same as the OEO's of using lawsuits and other means to attack broad underlying difficulties of the poor or whether the focus should be more narrowly defined to addressing small, specific situations. The LSC Act said that the organization was to pursue "equal access to justice," but Cramton wrote that while the law was intended to proscribe the blatantly-political objects of the 1960s OEO's work, it was worded ambiguously. Carter era In December 1977, President Jimmy Carter nominated Hillary Rodham to the board of directors of the LSC, for a term to expire in July 1980. Rodham, an attorney with Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas and the wife of Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton, had a background in children's law and policy and had worked in providing legal services for the poor while at Yale Law School. She had also done 1976 campaign coordination work for Carter in Indiana. This was a recess appointment, so Rodham took her place on the board without immediate Senate confirmation. Rodham was nominated again in January 1978 as a regular appointment. In mid-1978, the Carter administration chose the thirty-year-old Rodham to become chair of the board, the first woman to become so. The position entailed her traveling monthly from Arkansas to Washington, D.C. for two-day meetings. During Rodham's Senate confirmation hearings, she subscribed to the philosophy that LSC should seek to reform laws and regulations that it viewed as "unresponsive to the needs of the poor." Rodham was successful in getting increases in Congressional funding for LSC, stressing its usual role in