AZJL_Mar13

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-prole 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 decit 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
“I was the kid who always looked out
for the underdog.” – Charles Arnold
had burned down two or three times,” said Arnold in an interview on the public television
program Arizona Horizon in May 2012. “John was ill; he wasn’t stupid … each
day he’d stop at our oce 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. ere was a critical need to hold our communities accountable
for the statutes that we had passed.” Arnold joined with the Center for Law and the
Public Interest to le a class-action suit, Arnold vs. Sarn, on behalf of Gauss and four
other named plaintis. 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. “e terms of the legal statute aren’t being addressed, more than 30 years
after we led 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 anity 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. e experiences I had with my sister made me a better advocate
in my work, and my work fuels a wonderful way of being a nice person while still
being a lawyer.”
Elizabeth Schwartz is a freelance writer and musician.
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