About me
After more than 45 years of practicing law in both the public and private sectors, Judy recently retired to serve full time as President of The Matthew Harris Ornstein Memorial Foundation (MHOMF), in order to further the Foundation’s mission to eliminate stigma, minimize suffering, and improve the treatment and the lives of those held captive by serious mental illness. Judy, her husband Norman Ornstein, and their surviving son Daniel established MHOMF following the death of Judy and Norman’s older son and Daniel’s brother, Matthew, at the age of 34.
Matthew had been a brilliant, kind, funny, popular young man, who had excelled at Princeton, studied in South Africa and had found early success in Hollywood, before he was robbed of his promise, and eventually his life, by the onset of an undiagnosed, untreated mental illness. During the painful ten-year journey which followed, Matthew and his family encountered virtually every facet of the country’s badly broken system of care for those with serious mental illnesses. At MHOMF, Judy works for changes in those aspects of the country’s current approach to mental illness that, based on her family’s personal experience, are most in need of repair.
Before her retirement, and after a clerkship with the DC Superior Court, Judy spent much of her career at the global law firm of Reed Smith, specializing in litigation, antitrust and consumer protection and later, communications and privacy law. She served for several years as Managing Partner of Reed Smith’s DC office, one of only a few women at the time to serve in that capacity at a major firm. Judy earned a JD from The Yale Law School in 1973, where she won the John Currier Gallagher Prize, and a BA, with highest distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Michigan in 1970.
