AR Times: “Herb Rule, a Little Rock lawyer who served in the Arkansas legislature and on the Little Rock School Board during some of their stormiest days, died Monday. He was the victor in one of the most famous (if not the most famous) legislative races in Arkansas history;his defeat of the legendary boss of the country boys, Representative Paul Van Dalsem of Perryville, in the Democratic primaries of 1966.
Van Dalsem, a House leader during the Little Rock school crisis of 1957–59 who shepherded some of the segregation bills for Governor Orval E. Faubus through committees and the House of Representatives, made a derogatory comment at a civic club luncheon in 1963 about keeping nosey women in Perry County barefoot and pregnant so they would stay out of politics and public affairs. He paid a price for it in 1966 when he arranged for Perry County, his home, to be moved into a district with Pulaski County after the US Supreme Court’s one-man, one-vote decisions. He ran for his seat again with the promise to do for city folks what he did for the rural regions of the state, which he thought would appeal to the business leaders in the county. The women who led the revolt against Faubus in 1959 and the people who opposed segregation and the closing of the city’s high schools banded together again as the Barefoot Women for Rule and elected the young lawyer by a landslide in 1966.
Rule led a band of rejuvenated liberals in the last years of the 1960s, often supporting the taxes and reforms promoted by the Republican governor, Winthrop Rockefeller. Rule was the author in 1969 of the mixed-drinks law, supported by Rockefeller, that allowed communities to have local-option elections to sell mixed drinks at restaurants, hotels and private clubs. He also championed other reforms through constitutional amendments, including one that would have established a special state court to see after the appointment of independent judges and to govern matters of the conduct and competency of judges.
He practiced law at the state’s first law firm, known now as the Rose Law Firm, for 48 years, part of it with Hillary Rodham Clinton, the wife of the governor and president, Bill Clinton.”