If you want support, you have to be open to the world around you and seek it out.
—Hon. Lynne A. Battaglia
While in law school, I had the opportunity to clerk for the Honorable Lynne A. Battaglia, associate judge on the Maryland Court of Appeals. I met Judge Battaglia in the winter of my second year in law school. I was an intern for the Women’s Bar Foundation and had been hired to assist Judge Battaglia and her law clerks with a project on the history of women lawyers in Maryland. I knew little about law, and much less about the history of women lawyers, but I was excited to spend winter break from school in a judge’s chambers.
As a law student, the idea of “chambers” sounded almost mythic, and Judge Battaglia’s chambers did not disappoint. The law clerks’ desks were always covered with piles of drafts marked up with red ink, volumes of the Maryland Reporter, and stacks of books from the law library. Judge Battaglia would call her clerks into her office for meetings where they would sit for hours, talking through the ins and outs of the opinions they had been assigned. That spring, Judge Battaglia allowed me to stay on as a judicial intern. At the end of the judicial internship, she offered me the opportunity to clerk for her while I was finishing up my last year of law school. That year was one of the most challenging and rewarding that I have experienced.