He was finally done in by congestive heart failure and emphysema, which was more than the combined forces of enemy soldiers, his less astute colleagues on the bench, or any combination thereof could muster against him. This former Marine, who served in Vietnam, spent 24 years as an Arkansas Supreme Court justice. And another decade on the state's Court of Appeals. Throughout all controversies, he stayed true to the Corps' motto: Semper Fi, or Always Faithful.
"He had a strong value system," as one of his fellow justices on Arkansas' highest court put it in what might be the understatement of the year. Mr. Justice Corbin may simply have inherited those values. His grandfather on his mother's side was a drummer boy in the Confederate army. His grandmother on that side of the family had been crippled by polio, he remembered, and "learned how to walk by hanging onto the tail of a mule and letting it drag her around the yard." His grandfather on his father's side was a physician who lost his money during one of the intermittent bank crashes during the 1920s and so decided to rear his three sons as butchers.
The decisions Don Corbin handed down, like the man himself, stood the test of time till they became settled law. And stand they still do. Like his landmark decision in Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee, which declared that the law meant what it said about every child in this state having a chance for an adequate education.
With a sense of humor as acute as his sense of the law, he was a great practical joker, too. As his colleague Bob Brown discovered slowly but surely, even if it meant gradually sinking out of sight. "Don Corbin," he said, "had more personality than the rest of the court put together. He was an exuberant man." As his rhetoric on the campaign trail demonstrated time and again when he was running for state legislator and his opponent told a crowd: "I just love to come around in these hot summer days and visit with you on your front porch and help you shell those purple hull peas." To which Don Corbin responded a moment later by saying: "I've shelled all the purple hull peas I want to in my lifetime. My mother and grandmother had purple fingers for months. I'm not going to help you shell your peas. I'll be your legislator and I'll try to do a good job there, but I'm not going to be a pea sheller." The election was his.
It was only a month after Don Corbin took his seat on the state's Court of Appeals that he had a heart attack, and he would undergo many another ordeal in attempts to treat two types of cancer as well as various arterial and gastric sicknesses. Yet he never missed a week of work writing his now distinguished opinions. He may not have been another Richard Arnold or Huey Long in exhibiting either his sense of law or sense of humor, but he was Don Corbin, and that was more than enough.
Bob Brown remembers slowly sinking out of sight as he conferred with his fellow justices around the conference table. It turned out that Don Corbin had been gradually lowering Justice Brown's seat week after week, turn after turn, till Bob Brown's chin was even with the table.
His motto as a Marine might have been Always Faithful, but as a fun-loving human being, he believed in Leave 'em Laughing. And better educated. R.I.P., Justice Corbin. You are unlikely to be forgotten, and neither are your decisions.
Editorial on 12/19/2016