Bruce J. Ennis: A remembrance.

Abstract

Bruce J. Ennis, a major advocate in the battle for the rights of those defined as mentally ill, died July 29, 2000, from the sequelae of leukemia. He was also my colleague, mentor, law partner, and most importantly, my best friend. When I saw him for the last time in late May, he was recovering from intensive treatment involving chemotherapy and stem cell replacement therapy. His hair was growing back, his stentorian baritone with which he entranced the Justices of the Supreme Court was returning, and he had just learned that there were no longer any leukemic cells in his blood. But, the treatment also destroyed his immune system; in late July he contracted a lung infection that could not be arrested and he died within a week of his last hospitalization in Boston. It is altogether fitting that this journal grant space to this brief remembrance. It is unlikely that there is, or will be, a more staunch and capable advocate for the rights of those considered as mentally disabled as Bruce Ennis. After graduating cum laude from Dartmouth in 1962 and in the top 10% of his 1965 law school class at the University of Chicago, and a brief stint as a Wall Street lawyer, he joined the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) in 1968 as a staff attorney. While there, as the Director of the Mental Patients Rights Project, he became the first lawyer to work full-time on behalf of this still under-represented population. In that role, and working with others, he was a prime participant in the three landmark cases that became the high point of the civil rights movement for those with mental disabilities. In Wyatt v. Stickney, 344 F Supp. 373; 344 F. Supp. 387 (M.D. Ala. 1972) aff'd, Wyatt v. Aderholt, 503 F.2d 1305 (5th Cir. 1974), he challenged the conditions of hospitalization for those with mental illness and mental retardation, leading to significant reductions of the institutions' populations, major increases in expenditures for mental health and rehabilitative services, improvements in psychologist-patient ratios, noteworthy reductions in the abuses of patients, and the adoption of the then innovative idea of individualized treatment and rehabilitation plans. The principles argued for by Bruce and adopted by the late Judge Frank Johnson in his final order were soon copied by 35 other states.