Raymond Collins Kilgore Jr. (1941–2025)

Collins Kilgore was an Arkansas-born lawyer who spent twenty-four years as a trial judge, during which time he rendered the most far-reaching judgment in modern Arkansas history—the order in the case of Lake View v. Huckabee, which determined that the state of Arkansas had to levy and distribute taxes to meet the state constitution’s promise of a suitable and equal education for every child. His Lake View order and its subsequent passages through the Arkansas General Assembly and the Supreme Court of Arkansas capped thirty years of political and judicial brawling over reforming and financing public education. The issue continued to vex the legislative and executive branches in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Kilgore’s first electoral victory, in a race for chancery judge in 1990, was one of the few instances in Arkansas history when a sitting trial judge was defeated for reelection. While he was not seriously contested for the chancery and circuit court offices thereafter, he lost his one race for higher office—justice of the state Supreme Court in 2004.

Raymond Collins Kilgore Jr. was born on December 3, 1941, at Fordyce (Dallas County) to Raymond Collins Kilgore Sr. and Edith Thornton Kilgore; he had three sisters and one brother. His father was a salesman for an electrical appliance company, among other businesses, and Kilgore lived and went to school in Fordyce, Little Rock (Pulaski County), and Wichita, Kansas. He enjoyed working as a youngster, as a newspaper carrier, a checker and bagger at a grocery store, a taxicab driver, and an attendant at a carwash.

He attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) before serving in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1967. He then completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a law degree at the University of Arkansas School of Law in 1977. He earned a master’s degree in tax law at the Georgetown University Law School in Washington DC. Three of his UA law classmates—Chris Piazza, Mary Ann McGowan, and Gary Isbell—also were elected district judges, Piazza and McGowan working in the same Little Rock courthouse with Kilgore. He and Priscilla Whitlock of Waterbury, Connecticut (whom he had met during his time in Boulder) married on December 24, 1976; they would have two sons.

Kilgore had a law practice in the Pyramid Building in Little Rock until 1990, when he opposed Chancellor John Earl in the Democratic primaries (before the state constitution was amended to require nonpartisan election of judges). Earl had become controversial for his antics on the bench. Although Earl collected twice the campaign contributions of Kilgore, Kilgore narrowly won the election. The division of trial judges as circuit (law) judges and chancery (equity) judges ended in 2000 when the constitution was amended to assign both law and equity cases to circuit judges. Kilgore served on the bench through December 2014, when he retired.

The dispute over whether and how to comply with the state constitution’s mandate to provide an equal and “suitable” education for every child—the central issue was what exactly was “suitable”—consumed the middle years of Kilgore’s judicial career, as it did a dozen Supreme Court justices. After World War II and the reform efforts of Governor Sid McMath, the matter of raising and distributing taxes, both those levied by the state and by local property taxes, among the hundreds of Arkansas school districts occupied the legislature every two years. Every formula (the Minimum Foundation Program Aid formula) developed by the biennial legislatures seemed to leave huge disparities among the school districts. (Per-pupil spending among school districts in 1978–79 ranged from $873 a year to $2,378.) The lawsuit Jim DuPree et al. v. Alma School District No. 30, decided by the Supreme Court on May 31, 1983, produced a decision that each of the biennial formulas had failed badly to guarantee a uniformly good education for children in rich and poor, rural and urban school districts, and it directed the state to find a solution.

That was at the beginning of Governor Bill Clinton’s second term, and a special legislative session on education that fall started the long search for a solution. It meant higher state standards for accreditation, a competency test for teachers, higher taxes proposed by Clinton and enacted by the legislature, and other reforms such as college aid for young students. The reform efforts continued throughout Clinton’s twelve-year governorship and those of his successors Jim Guy Tucker, Mike Huckabee, and Mike Beebe.

The concluding chapter, at least for that era, involved a lawsuit filed by a lawyer for a small predominantly Black rural school district in the Mississippi Delta. Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee, which alleged that all the reforms enacted during the Clinton and Tucker years, including a constitutional amendment that recirculated local school property taxes among districts, had not done the job required by Article XIV of the constitution: the education article. Chancellor Annabelle Clinton Imber of Little Rock granted the injunction and ordered the state to finally consummate the constitution’s objective. While her orders were on appeal to the Supreme Court, Judge Imber (later Judge Annabelle Tuck) ran for a seat on the Supreme Court and was elected. The Lake View case, which would bounce around in the courts for another ten years, was reassigned to Judge Kilgore. Justice Imber then recused herself whenever the case reached the Supreme Court, as it did repeatedly.

When Lake View was sent back to Judge Kilgore, he conducted extensive hearings on remedies for the educational-equity problems and issued a sweeping order in 2001. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision, but the case journeyed through the court and the legislature, including reviews by two special masters (former justices) assigned by the court, until 2014.

Although the litigation ended, disputes over how to spend local and state public school monies continued. In 2023, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Republican legislature enacted a law transferring taxes earmarked for the public schools to private and religious schools for tuition and to tens of thousands of parents who said they would educate the children at home; this law (the LEARNS Act) seemed to violate the education and taxation articles of the constitution specifying that taxes raised for the public schools had to be spent on the public schools.

While Kilgore’s Lake View decision was historic, it did not make him universally admired. He ran for an open seat on the Supreme Court in 2004 against two other trial judges from western Arkansas. He reached the runoff but lost to Circuit Judge James Houston (Jim) Gunter Jr. of Hope (Hempstead County), who said years later that although he had not made an issue of Kilgore’s controversial ruling in Lake View, he was sure that it delivered the election to him rather than to Kilgore.

Kilgore died on June 11, 2025. His memorial service was conducted at the White Water Tavern in Little Rock.

For additional information:
Brantley, Max. “It’s Now or Never.” Arkansas Times, June 16, 2005, p. 16.

———. “Lake View Drags On.” Arkansas Times, November 30, 2006. Online at http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2006/11/30/lake-view-drags-on (accessed January 9, 2026).

“Judge Collins Kilgore.” Obituary, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, June 22, 2025, p. 1K.

Lake View School District vs. Governors of Arkansas Collection, M11-011. University of Central Arkansas Archives, Conway, Arkansas.

Lake View School Dist. No. 25 v. Huckabee, 351 Ark 31, 91 SW3d 472 [2002].

Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee (Lake View 2004), 189 S.W.3d 1 (Ark. 2004).

Searight, Patricia A. “Lake View Litigation, Arkansas’ Education Funding Policy, and Adequacy: A Conflict between Individual Need and Collective Resource.” PhD diss., University of Central Arkansas, 2016.