From a reporter’s diary: Darrell Hickman did more to make Arkansas better by saying “No” than most anyone else in government did by saying “Yes.” Or by looking the other way. A White County native of modest beginnings, Hickman understood manual labor from experience; it paid for his college education and his law degree.
The law degree entitled him to successfully challenge at the polls a politically tainted judge of the state’s since-abolished chancery courts. Hickman’s candidacy was, in effect, a “No” to courthouse cronyism, and his “No” rulings in four years on the trial bench secured his reformer’s reputation. In 1976 he won, handily, a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court. More “no”s.
Across more than two decades of judicial service:
- No, those expense accounts for county officials were not constitutional
- No, that convention to rewrite the state constitution was not properly chosen
- No, those revenue bonds for capital improvements were not lawful
- No, that grotesque utility rate proposal that then-Gov. Bill Clinton supported was not fit for the general election ballot
- No, the Supreme Court should not control the state’s judicial discipline machinery.
Hickman resigned from the Supreme Court in 1990, intending to spend time with his family and travel (he was a serious motorcyclist) but accepted a couple of temporary gubernatorial appointments to trial courts when vacancies occurred. His stewardship brought about a state government that is leaner and cleaner, but not meaner. He died last week at age 91, his cancer diagnosed only months earlier. His first round of chemotherapy convinced him he did not want another. From Darrell Hickman, one last “no.”…