Patti R. Bednarik

Patti Rose Scheimer Bednarik was born on May 21, 1957, in the Mount Lebanon area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She earned an undergraduate degree in social welfare from Pennsylvania State University in 1981 and a master's degree in social work from the University of Maryland before pursuing the law, graduating from the UCLA School of Law in Los Angeles. She began her legal career as a litigation associate at a California law firm and then practiced briefly in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she was admitted to the State Bar of Nevada in 1989.

Returning to Pennsylvania, she built a distinguished career in public service and the regulation of the legal profession. She served as an Assistant District Attorney in the Allegheny County District Attorney's Office and, from 1996 to 2010, as Counsel for District III of the Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. She was a member of the Pennsylvania Board of Law Examiners from 2007 to 2010 and served as its Director of Character and Fitness from 2010 to 2013. She also taught as an adjunct professor of animal law at Widener University School of Law and at the Penn State Dickinson School of Law.

Patti R. Bednarik was widely recognized as a pioneering advocate for animal welfare. She was the founder and first Chair of the Animal Law Committee of the Pennsylvania Bar Association and served as course planner for the first Pennsylvania Bar Institute Animal Law Conference in 2004. Appointed to the Dog Law Advisory Board by Governor Edward G. Rendell in 2006, she worked to toughen state laws against puppy mills and to strengthen regulation of commercial breeding kennels. She died on October 26, 2013, at the age of 56.