{"id":24843,"date":"2023-01-20T16:55:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-20T22:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kwu.edu\/?p=24843"},"modified":"2023-01-05T13:04:59","modified_gmt":"2023-01-05T19:04:59","slug":"feature-judge-began-life-of-service-at-kwu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kwu.edu\/about\/news\/feature-judge-began-life-of-service-at-kwu\/","title":{"rendered":"Feature: Judge Began Life of Service at KWU"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story originally appeared in the Fall 2022 Contact magazine.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Public service is in Angela Coble \u201994\u2019s nature, even in her profession, but she sees it as so much more.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, we can vote in elections as they come up to hope to shape our community, but really public service is kind of the ultimate exercise in democracy,\u201d Coble said. \u201cBy volunteering and actually working in our community every day, that\u2019s how we can really shape our community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Public service is also Coble\u2019s profession. Almost a year ago, she was appointed to the 14-judge Kansas Court of Appeals by Gov. Laura Kelly.<\/p>\n

\u201cI, of course, vote, but the best way to make sure we live in a place we want to live in is to get out there and do something about it. I feel like I started doing that at Wesleyan, and I\u2019ve kept doing it to date.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kansas Wesleyan wasn\u2019t on Angela Chesney\u2019s radar in high school in Stockton. But she had been named Junior Miss Rooks County, and KWU offered scholarships to all county junior misses. So she came to check it out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just fell in love with it,\u201d Coble said. \u201cComing from such a small town, I was looking for that smaller community feel. Before I graduated high school, I came and tried out for cheerleader here at Wesleyan and made the cheer team. I was offered the Presidential Scholarship, so I had that group,\u201d which met on a weekly basis.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween choir and cheer squad and Presidential Scholars meetings, it didn\u2019t take long to get involved,\u201d Coble said.<\/p>\n

She lived in Pfeiffer, where she was an RA her sophomore and junior years.<\/p>\n

Coble started at Kansas Wesleyan as a freshman psychology major in 1990. But after she took her first criminology class, a requirement for her major, she switched to criminal justice but kept psychology as a minor.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy advisor was Don Olsen. He was great,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Then she took a Spanish class from Consuelo Diaz and added a Spanish minor.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would never have thought that I would go to college and minor in Spanish. But how could you go into Ms. Diaz\u2019s class and not?\u201d Coble asked. \u201cShe was so fantastic. She\u2019s the one who really inspired me to go ahead and seek a minor in Spanish because she was so engaging and supportive.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Spanish was useful when she went to Mexico with a Habitat for Humanity group for 10 days.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe raised money and went to Mexico City,\u201d she said. \u201cI never worked so hard in my life! We stayed with the locals, and they fed us at each of the (three) job sites. It was an eye-opening experience for me, never having been outside Kansas much, to see how other people lived, different cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Choir tours also exposed her to parts of the country she\u2019d never seen.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was pretty shy, but having to put yourself out there, staying in host families\u2019 homes, having to go into someone else\u2019s house and make conversation \u2014 that added to the whole college experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also part of the college experience was being homecoming queen in the fall of 1993.<\/p>\n

Her studies didn\u2019t suffer as part of the \u201ccollege experience,\u201d which also included an internship and part-time jobs during her four years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got the student Hall of Fame award at graduation and the academic award that year,\u201d Coble said. \u201cI still have my Kansas Honor Society pin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Less typical was that she married between her junior and senior years and they moved to North Hall. She had her first son four days before graduating.<\/p>\n

While her then-husband went to medical school, Coble found a job in the clerk\u2019s office of the federal court in Kansas City.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got to see all the cases that came in and follow the progression of the cases and read legal documents,\u201d Coble said.<\/p>\n

One of her supervisors, a lawyer, told her to read one of the documents and if she found it interesting, she should consider law school.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat really cemented my thought that I would some day go to law school,\u201d Coble said, and she applied to Washburn University School of Law.<\/p>\n

Her first year, she commuted from Salina. She wanted to stay involved with her four children.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought, it\u2019s only three years,\u201d Coble said. \u201cI can do anything for only three years. Sleep was totally overrated at that point.\u201d<\/p>\n

She moved to Topeka for her last two years, after she was divorced.<\/p>\n

In 2009, she accepted a job at Kennedy, Berkley, Yarnevich and Williamson law firm in Salina as a civil litigator, but she was asked to work in family law and other areas, as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe nice thing about that practice was it took me into a lot of county courts in surrounding counties,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

From there, she accepted a job as a clerk for a federal judge in Wichita, then for that judge\u2019s replacement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always knew I\u2019d like to do the law clerk route because I knew I\u2019d like the research and writing of the law, more than appearing in court,\u201d Coble said. \u201cI like digging into the law, researching, then writing a brief.\u201d<\/p>\n

Law clerks are research attorneys, chamber counsel, law clerk \u2014 \u201cIt all means the same thing,\u201d Coble said. \u201cBasically you\u2019re the judge\u2019s attorney, doing research for her, advising her on how she should rule on specific disputes, then drafting her opinions.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time she started applying for judgeships, she\u2019d written more than 300 briefs.<\/p>\n

In true Coble fashion, she\u2019s also kept up with her outside activities.<\/p>\n

She has been on the boards of the Salina Healthcare Foundation and Airport Authority. Other leadership positions have been with the Salina Emergency Aid-Food Bank, Leadership Salina, Four Rivers Support Committee, school and parent-teacher organizations, and professional bar associations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s just my nature that I enjoy being involved and want to be part of the community. I think Wesleyan really reinforced and helped to grow that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Story and Photo by Jean Kozubowski<\/span><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":24844,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFeature: Judge Began Life of Service at KWU - Kansas Wesleyan University<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kwu.edu\/about\/news\/feature-judge-began-life-of-service-at-kwu\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Feature: Judge Began Life of Service at KWU - 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