AR Times: “Philip Edwin Kaplan, a Little Rock lawyer who was nationally recognized for his work in civil and human rights, died Friday of a stroke.
Kaplan moved to Little Rock in 1968 and started his career in class-action lawsuits representing inmates in the Arkansas prison system, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. The landmark Holt v. Sarver case challenged the conditions of prisoners’ confinement. The case, which Kaplan won, set the precedent to allow inmates to challenge the constitutionality of their conditions.
His career included work at a handful of law firms, and he founded Arkansas’s first integrated law firm.”