KTAL: Federal judge started in TV at fresh-faced age 14

Age 16, Morris S. Arnold wields a TV camera in 1954.
Photo owned by Judge Arnold.

Senior U.S. Circuit Court Judge Morris S. Arnold appeared on KTAL-TV this week (embed below) talking about his youthful career in television.

KTAL started broadcasting in Texarkana, Ark., Judge Arnold's home town, in 1953, as KCMC, using the call sign of its sister radio station that had broadcast since 1933. Born in 1941, a young Judge Arnold was captivated by the newly prevalent medium. At age 14, he got his first job at the station, a go-for for election returns. Four to five decades later, the once TV go-for and camera operator earned a reputation for libertarian interpretation of the First Amendment.

Though, notwithstanding three decades on the federal bench, it's "just a regular ol' tort case, like a slip and fall," in diversity or supplemental jurisdiction, that gives Judge Arnold the "most joy," he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a 2013 profile.

A polymath, Arnold—full disclosure: a cherished friend—studied engineering and classics and had an illustrious academic career before his appointment to the federal bench. With an S.J.D. from Harvard University, he served, inter alia, as professor and dean at the Indiana Maurer Law School and as a vice president and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Ronald Reagan appointed Arnold to the district bench in his home jurisdiction of western Arkansas in 1985, and President George H.W. Bush appointed him to the Eighth Circuit in 1992.

Judge Arnold
Wikimedia Commons

Now on senior status, Judge Arnold still hears cases and occasionally writes opinions. But retirement from full-time service on the bench afforded him time to return to his passion for history. In the 2010s, he cleared his desk of works in progress with a series of articles for the quarterly journal of the Arkansas Historical Association. Here are his most recent five:

• Barthélémy Dit Charlot, a Colonial Arkansas Métis and Voyageur (2015);
• François Ménard, a Colonial Arkansas "Marchand" and "Habitant" (2015);
• Colonial Arkansas Women (2017);
• The Soldiers of Spain in Colonial Arkansas (2018); and
• The Quapaws and the American Revolution (2020).

The latter, a fascinating insight into the conflicted and delicate position into which the Revolution cast indigenous leaders in America—I caught up on my reading earlier this summer—was especially well received in critical circles.

Judge Arnold is the author of five books on American history in the once territory of the Louisiana Purchase, and he is a co-editor of Arkansas: A Narrative History (2d ed. 2013). The most critically acclaimed of Judge Arnold's books is the oft cited Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673-1804 (2000), also focused on the Quapaw.

But the top Arnold book for me is The Arkansas Post of Louisiana (2017). When I visited Judge Arnold in the spring, he said he is most proud of The Arkansas Post because it was a collaboration with Gail K. Arnold, the judge's wife, who provided photographs and edited illustrations. As a veteran Arkansas hiker, I immensely enjoyed visiting the Arkansas Post National Memorial many years ago, armed with Judge Arnold's earlier writings on frontier settlement and the colonial period.

Judge Arnold's work on legal history is featured in my fall Torts class annually, as his 1979 law review article on the origins of common law is excerpted in my textbook, Tortz: A Study of American Tort Law, volume 1 (Lulu, SSRN 2023). In Accident, Mistake, and Rules of Liability in the Fourteenth-Century Law of Torts, Arnold challenged the conventional wisdom of the renowned Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had posited that modern culpability doctrine was the achievement of a gradual common law evolution dating to medieval England.

It's often struck me that Judge Arnold has earned a remarkable legacy in both author and subject indices of historical research.