Pursuing the Art of Law

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Pursuing the Art of Law

At Utica, Bernadette King ’28 finds a pathway to the legal profession through her passion for creativity

Two short years ago, Bernadette King ’28 wasn’t convinced that she would even attend college. Now she’s contemplating law school. Her experiences at Utica University have allowed her to envision a future she might never have imagined possible.

When asked what has surprised her most about the opportunities and achievements the past two years have brought, she doesn’t hesitate.

“All of it,” she says.

King had originally considered pursuing an agricultural career. She had spent her summer throughout high school working on a small farm in German Flatts, a rural town twenty miles southeast of her home in Utica. She tended to the goats, repaired fences, and performed a range of other tasks.

“I had thought that college wasn’t going to be for me,” she says.

She shared with the farm’s owner, a close family friend, her plans of forgoing college – possibly opting for a trade school. The response was forthright. “She said, ‘You need to get yourself to college,’” King recalls, “So I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to give it a try.’”

King struggled with selecting a college major, let alone a school. For one, her interests are widely varied – farming, photography, creative writing, digital media, to name only a few. At the same time, she was compelled, out of a sense of obligation, to follow in the career path of her late mother and become a substance abuse counselor.

She ultimately enrolled as a psychology major at Utica, the school two minutes from her home and where her father, Philip, had recently accepted a teaching position in the Cybersecurity department.

Psychology offered a popular pathway toward a counseling career. But while the idea of treading the same professional ground as her mother held sentimental appeal, King was already having second thoughts before she had even completed her first semester.

“Psychology was just too much math,” she says, half-jokingly.

The encouraging push to pursue a career based on personal joy and long-term fulfillment came from a most trusted source. “My dad sat me down and told me I didn’t have to appease anybody,” King says. “I could just follow what I would like to do.”

In that moment, she felt the weight of expectations lifted. She had always enjoyed writing. She had dabbled at poetry and other creative writing, but never shared her work, leaving her interest largely untapped. An unexpected turning point, which ultimately proved to be the catalyst for King finding a major and career path that aligns with her strengths and passions, came in the form of Professor Dan Tagliarina’s Political Ideology class.

“I love to write and argue,” she says, “but I didn’t know I was good at it until I took Professor Tag’s class.”

Tagliarina’s class was a catalyst for not only changing her major to political science, but also for, in a roundabout way, discovering a penchant for law.

As her interest in politics and law deepened, King increasingly sought guidance from Tagliarina, who also happened to be the University’s pre-law advisor. They discussed in passing the possibility of King pursuing law school. It was also around that time when she met Bernie Hyman, a criminal justice professor and active prosecutor in the Oneida County District Attorney’s Office, during an unexpected encounter in Bull Hall. After learning about her interests, Hyman encouraged King to join the University’s mock trial team, which he advises.

The pieces quickly fell into place.

“Once I met Professor Hyman and joined Mock Trial, the rest sort of was history,” she says. “I always had an interest in law, but I honestly doubted my ability to pull it off.”

Learning at the intersection

King’s wide-ranging interests are an integral part of both who she is and the professional she aspires to become. Among them, her passion for writing and the fine arts stands out as a defining attribute. She is taking a minor in creative writing to complement her new major, and this spring published a poem in the University’s literary journal, The Ampersand.

As someone who dwells at the intersection of multiple disciplines, she feels fortunate to have encountered at Utica a faculty and an academic culture that is well-positioned to help her find meaningful connection between her pre-law studies and the wealth of knowledge and creativity she’s exploring in her other classes.

Tagliarina’s POL 323 course, for example, focuses on utopias and dystopias in novels. And Hyman integrates the importance of theatre in law, teaching students the value of performance techniques such as storytelling, body language, and voice modulation to make compelling arguments.

“We have the best professors in the world here. There’s just this really intentional focus amongst them in taking knowledge, combining it in the interdisciplinary way, and putting it into application,” says King. “It just makes the classes here so incredibly fascinating, but also I think it just adds so much more depth to your education and your end goal of a career when it’s time to leave here.”

And she believes it will one day set her apart as an attorney.

The creative edge

King feels strongly her passion for the creative arts will prove to be a distinct asset in her future profession.

“It’s kind of strange going into the legal field as a creative,” she says, “because, on one hand, most people (in the profession) are super type A and I’m way more laid back than that. But it also gives me a different way of looking at things.

“Like when I’m breaking apart a case, I’m able to imagine things differently compared to how my peers would. And when I’m arguing a case at mock trial, having that creative edge allows me to be more engaging with whatever audience I’m in front of. When we have a jury, you can captivate them a lot easier when you’re able to take legal arguments and put them in a way that more people would understand. That requires a lot of creativity to present big ideas and big arguments in a way that anyone could understand. You can know all the rules of evidence, but if you don’t know how to present that, it’s going to be worthless.”

King admits, before her exposure to mock trial, she was the student shaking in her shoes when giving a speech. Now, she is competing shoulder-to-shoulder against students from institutions like Yale, Amherst, and West Point and capturing awards for her courtroom performance.

In only two years, Utica University has empowered her to pursue her passions by providing the inspiration, opportunities, and support she has needed at every turn.

Tagliarina believes King is building a portfolio and honing the skills, both professional and creative, that will help her earn a place in law school – and thrive once she gets there and throughout her career.

“Watching her really find her voice and seeing her be able to find the things that she’s most passion about and make those connections to a career has been truly rewarding,” Tagliarina says. “With all of her interests, they’re very diverse, but it leads to really great insights because she’s borrowing from so many different places. That’s what I want for all students.”

Her next goal is law school, where she hopes to begin the path toward a career in entertainment law.

“I never thought I had this in me,” she says. “It means the world to have professors who are so invested in you.”