Inman-Campbell recalls career in law

The Honorable Judge Gail Inman-Campbell will serve her last day as district judge on Dec. 31. The judge is retiring this year after decades serving the community in multiple roles including private practice attorney, district judge, and circuit judge.

Inman-Campbell’s career in law was something she planned since childhood. “I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was probably in the seventh grade,” she shared. “I am horrible at math and science and that didn’t leave a whole lot of room. I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher — I didn’t have the temperament for it, or the patience, so that kind of left law.”

If she’d been born a little later, Inman-Campbell would have considered other paths, “There’s a lot more avenues and fields to go into (now). If I was younger I wouldn’t mind going into software design or something like that but that wasn’t even a twinkle in anybody’s eye at the time.”

Inman-Campbell graduated from Alpena High School and went to University of Arkansas where, as a freshman, she met her husband — Ron Campbell. “We got married and moved to Little Rock and finished up UALR there, then we went on to law school. He was from Mount Judea, so we both wanted to come back to this area. We were fortunate - he got a job with what was then Security Bank.”

“Both of our families were here and we wanted to raise our family here - neither one of us enjoyed Little Rock because it was too hot and too flat,” said Inman-Campbell.

Her husband ended up working for a few different banks throughout his career and retired a few years ago. The couple lives near Alpena now. “My family has had a farm here for over four generations. We live on that farm and still run cattle on it. My mother is 99 and she is still on the farm, we take care of her. My sister lives there too. I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

The couple has two children, both Harrison High School Graduates — a son who lives in Fayetteville and is the father to their two grandsons; and a daughter. “We are very proud of all of them - they are doing very well,” said Inman-Campbell.

Local attorneys William Walker and Gene Campbell were looking for a new attorney to hire at the time Inman-Campbell finished law school and they selected her. “It was quite progressive of them to hire me in 1983, to hire a woman who had just had a second child who was only six weeks old, so pretty progressive of them,” said Inman-Campbell.

There were not a lot of women practicing law in the state when she got started, “I would be described as "that woman lawyer," Inman-Campbell recalled. Her law school classes were made of less than 1/3 women. She was the only one who was pregnant during the day program as well. “I was pregnant when I started and when I finished,” she said, having had both of her two children during her law school years.

“None of my family were very enthusiastic about me going to law school at all. There was the general distrust of lawyers and I was a woman with a family and being a teacher was so much more acceptable but that just did not appeal to me,” she shared.

Now her own daughter is an attorney — having worked in law for approximately fifteen years. When asked if her daughter was inspired to become a lawyer by her, Inman-Campbell laughed, “That’s what she claims.”

A shift to more women practicing law has been notable during Inman-Campbell’s time in the field, “The biggest change I’ve seen is more women in the field, in the practice. Of the six judges for this area — the circuit judges and the district judges, four of us are women, so we outnumber the men on the bench now.”

There have been other changes as well, like advances in technology, “When I started out, we did everything by books. They had just started with computer research when I was in law school — they were trying to teach us how to do it, but mainly, it was the books.”

“The greatest invention in the world is spellcheck. I have a form of dyslexia, I’m a horrible speller,” said Inman-Campbell. Technology enabled her to become more proficient at her work through tools like spell-check. “It gives you more time to do more stuff, but the workload never eases up.”

Technology hasn’t only been helpful though; it has also created new challenges for attorneys and judges. “Google makes it where people think they can do their own legal work. That has become more of a challenge — just because Google says it, doesn’t make it so,” said the judge.

“What a lot of people don’t understand is Google is a combination of all kinds of knowledge which may or may not apply to Arkansas. They may be answering your question based on California law or Kansas law, Texas…it may not apply to Arkansas. People come into court and have written these extensive briefs that have nothing to do with Arkansas law.”

Inman-Campbell has witnessed a few people putting their foot in their mouth in the courtroom, even without the misdirection of Google. “During my first term as district judge, I had a guy come in who was pleading not guilty to possession of a controlled substance and he said, “They can’t prove I had that pot because I threw it out the window.” This is not something a judge wants to hear from a defendant before a trial.

On another occasion, a case came through that hit very close to home. “I had a kid who was charged with criminal mischief. All I had was the charge in front of me, not the facts, so I was asking him what he had done,” said the judge. “Apparently, he had gone up and down a road here smacking mailboxes and he gave the name of the road…which happens to be the road I live on.”

The young man’s dad jumped up and told the judge that it was “no big deal,” so she responded, “Well, do you happen to remember a mailbox…” and described her own mailbox. “Guess whose house that is? Whose mailbox that was?” She told the boy's dad that it was actually a “pretty big deal” having to go buy a new mailbox and put it up in January in the cold.

A frustrating trend that the judge has noticed over time is that the legal system is not equipped to handle the mental health needs of the people it serves. “One of the trends I see now that is quite disturbing is that a lot of the people who come in front of me have mental health problems. They are not bad people, they are not evildoers, and they have no criminal intent — they have mental health issues and we have no resources to deal with that anywhere in the state.”

“We have no long term resources to help them,” said the judge. “Punishing them isn’t going to make any difference - it isn’t going to help. When they come in front of me, instead of sending them to jail, I would like to send them somewhere where they can get some real help counseling, medication, support. They end up self-medicating through alcohol drugs or both which makes the situation so much worse and then they are back in here in a month on the exact same charges again.”

When asked what remedies might be possible, Inman-Campbell expressed a need for legislation and “putting some money into it.” “Of course, it’s not a popular subject, she said. "Americans have always been shy or for some reason - shamed, about mental health but it’s getting worse and we’re going to have to do something. The legislature is going to have to put some money and some programs into place. In the long run, it will save us money and it will cut down on crime.”

After retirement, Inman-Campbell intends to do some traveling with her husband and to plan a wedding for their daughter. “I’m also just looking forward to not having a lot of plans,” shared the judge.

A retirement party for Gail Inman-Campbell is being held on Thursday, Dec. 19 and all are invited to attend. The drop-in party will take place Noon-2 p.m. at 402 N Walnut Street in Harrison, at the Circuit Court Room. Refreshments will be served. Wes Bradford will assume Inman-Campbell’s district judge post next year.