“I think of myself as a mental health lawyer,” says Charles Arnold, when asked what kind of law he practices. “We define our practice by the type of people we serve.”
Arnold – “Chick” to his friends – is one of three recipients of the Arizona Region American Jewish Committee’s 2013 Judge Learned Hand Award for Community Ser- vice. The award, bestowed annually on three members of the Jewish legal community, recognizes exceptional emerging leaders, public service and community service. This year’s other recipients are Terry Goddard, former Arizona attorney general and former mayor of Phoenix (public service), and Phoenix lawyer Nicole Stanton (emerging leadership). According to an AJC news release, “AJC’s Judge Learned Hand award recognizes distinguished individuals within the legal profession. Established in 1964, it honors those who have contrib- uted meaningfully to the legal com- munity and whose work reflects the integrity and broad humanitarian ideals exemplified by Judge Hand.”
Arnold joined the firm of Frazer Ryan Goldberg & Arnold, LLP, in June of 2002; his area of specialization is mental health and elder law, and his clients are the developmentally disabled, the mentally ill and the elderly. Arnold also served as the Mari- copa County Public Fiduciary from 1980 to 1981; in that role, he was the guardian and conservator of approximately 600 mentally ill adults in Maricopa County. Arnold is also the named plaintiff in a landmark class-action lawsuit to assert the rights of the men- tally ill in Arizona.
Beginning around 1979, social policies across America regard- ing the mentally ill shifted away from a pattern of institutionalization to a gradual integration of people with mental health issues into the wider community. “When I became the public guardian, it was a time when the deinstitutionalization process was in full swing,” Arnold recalls. “The first step in that process was development of community-based services for people who’d been in institutions; the second step involved releasing people from institutional care into an existing community support system. In Arizona we jumped to the second step without doing the first. As public guardian, I became the legal caretaker of these kinds of people.” The need for laws addressing the rights of the mentally ill emerged at the same time as Arnold’s stint as public guardian. “I grew up with this area of law; it coincided with my career trajectory,” he explains. “Because it was new and I was in a high-profile position as public guardian, I was able to have an impact on the way the law here has developed.”
In his job with Maricopa County, Arnold supervised the legal needs of more than 600 people with serious mental illnesses. Arizona’s traditionally Republican leanings toward less governmental involvement in providing human services, coupled with the fact that many people relocate to Phoenix alone, without their families or established communal support networks, made Arnold’s work especially challenging. “I helped draft legislation that is unique in the country; it states that everybody who lives in our state with a serious mental illness is entitled to a full range of community-based support. At that time, even Republicans recognized there was a deficit in this area, and I’ve always believed that it was collective communal guilt that passed this legislation,” says Arnold.
When the law passed, in 1980, it merely established these rights for the mentally ill; enforcing them was another matter. “Part of our community existed in what I termed a mental health ghetto – a part of town with single-room-occupancy hotels and boarding homes, which were scary places.” One of the people under Arnold’s supervision was a man named John Gauss, who walked the streets of Phoenix every day because he was afraid to stay in his home. “John’s residence, S & W boarding home, was notorious; it
had burned down two or three times,” said Arnold in an interview on the public televi- sion program Arizona Horizon in May 2012. “John was ill; he wasn’t stupid … each day he’d stop at our office downtown and visit me. He’d heard about the statute that was passed that gave rights to people with serious mental illness, and he wondered why there were no services available for him. I was a lawyer; I was John’s guardian; my gosh, I simply connected the dots. There was a critical need to hold our communities account- able for the statutes that we had passed.” Arnold joined with the Center for Law and the Public Interest to file a class-action suit, Arnold vs. Sarn, on behalf of Gauss and four other named plaintiffs. Despite legal victories in Arizona’s courts, including the Arizona Supreme Court, the demands of the lawsuit, which focus on the mandatory duty of the state to provide services enumerated in Arnold’s 1980 legislation, have still not been fully met. In 2000 Jane Hull, then serving as governor of Arizona, was added to the lawsuit
as a defendant. “The terms of the legal statute aren’t being addressed, more than 30 years after we filed our suit,” Arnold explains. “It’s still going on.”
Like many people who came of age in the 1960s, Arnold was determined to make the world a better place, and viewed law school as a means to that end, rather than an end in itself. “I had no intention of becoming a lawyer when I enrolled in law school at the University of Arizona,” Arnold explains. “I just thought a law school education would be invaluable for doing something to serve the greater good.” Arnold could not have predicted the convergence of mental health law with his own career path when he began practicing law in the early 1970s. However, his clear affinity for the legal specialization he helped pioneer has another, more personal, component. “I had a profoundly disabled sister. So much of my cultural upbringing had to do with being responsible for others; I was the kid who always looked out for the underdog, and I tutored disabled kids when I was just a kid myself.”
For Arnold, the social justice aspects of his Jewish upbringing in Queens and later at Temple Beth Israel in Phoenix, where his family relocated when Arnold was 14, are a central part of his world-view. “Helping make life better for those less fortunate is a critical aspect of our faith. The experiences I had with my sister made me a better advo- cate in my work, and my work fuels a wonderful way of being a nice person while still being a lawyer.”
