From the Forklift to the First Circuit

Hannah Hubler’s LinkedIn page lists most of the jobs she has held. Cashier at a dry cleaners in her hometown of Norton, Massachusetts. Sales associate at Target. Usher at a concert venue. Forklift operator at Home Depot, where she moved mulch pallets in the garden department. Paralegal. War-crimes researcher. Judicial intern at the Rhode Island Supreme Court and at the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

Most people headed for a federal clerkship, as she is, would have edited that list down long ago. But she left every line.

To Hubler, the dry cleaners and the First Circuit are both jobs she held, and she has never seen a reason to pretend otherwise. That quality—a refusal to perform—runs through everything about her. Ask about operating a forklift and she shrugs. “It was just kind of like driving,” she says. “You just get used to doing it.”

Ask about arguing before a panel of Massachusetts Appeals Court judges this spring, which she did as a certified law student attorney at the Suffolk County DA’s Office, and her tone is equally calm and measured. “It feels really good,” she says, “to be good at something that’s hard.”

Hubler grew up in Norton, Massachusetts. Her mother is an administrative assistant at Johnson & Johnson; her father is a CPA. She played on the high school softball team and always knew she wanted to be a lawyer. After graduating summa cum laude from Suffolk University’s Honors College with an undergraduate degree in law, she entered Suffolk Law in the fall of 2023.

What happened next is hard to explain without a spreadsheet.

During her first year alone, she worked as a paralegal at a litigation firm, drove the forklift at Home Depot, canvassed door-to-door for a political campaign, researched constitutional questions on abortion criminalization for a professor, and volunteered with the Ukraine Accountability Project—the Suffolk-hosted effort to document alleged Russian war crimes.

In her second year, she held two judicial internships simultaneously, at the Boston Municipal Court and the Rhode Island Supreme Court. It was at the BMC that appeals found her. The appellate division handed her a case, and something clicked. She had minored in English. She loved to write. “Clerking and appellate work just seemed like the natural path,” she says.

She landed at the DA’s Appeals Unit that summer, wrote briefs she later argued, and liked the work so much she came back twice—once after an internship at the First Circuit, where she traveled to Puerto Rico to observe oral arguments, and again this spring, staying beyond her required hours because she wanted to learn more. A brief she wrote has been accepted for direct appellate review by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

What drives Hubler isn’t winning or status—it’s tackling a challenge and mastering it. “It’s the same reason I liked evidence so much, the same reason I like appeals, the same reason I like constitutional law,” she says. “You have to think hard about something, and the answers don’t come easy.”

In August, Hubler begins a clerkship at the Rhode Island Supreme Court. She will then clerk for the US District Court in Boston for the 2027-28 term, and in 2029 for the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

Her climb has been driven not by recognition, but for “that aha moment,” she says, “when you finally figure out what the law is trying to say.”