Edward Barocas called it "Eddie-mechanics": the habit of finding an unconventional angle when the straightforward way was closed. On a tennis court, that meant serving without lifting his arm overhead, relying on spin and placement instead of power. Barocas, who spent seventeen years as legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and became one of the state's most consequential civil rights lawyers, died on September 11, 2026, in Fairfield, New Jersey, according to the ACLU of New Jersey. He was 59.

He had lived with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy since childhood and used a wheelchair for decades. "Eddie-mechanics applied to almost everything physical," he wrote years later, "and, as it turned out, beyond the physical." Of the method itself, he said: "I had to learn to step back, look at the big picture, consider a new approach, and find my own way."

Growing up, Barocas named two childhood heroes: Curious George and Horton the Elephant. "Curious George was always getting into trouble, just by being himself," he told the ACLU of New Jersey in 2026, while Horton taught him something else: "like Horton the Elephant, I got to be the voice of those who needed one." He studied at Rutgers College before earning his law degree from George Washington University's National Law Center in 1992.

He spent his first years in public interest law representing psychiatric patients committed to state hospitals through New Jersey's Division of Mental Health Advocacy, then several years as special counsel in the Office of the Public Defender's Special Hearings Unit in Newark, representing people in Megan's Law community notification hearings and helping bring constitutional challenges to the law.

Barocas became legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey in May 2001, four months before the September 11 attacks turned his early tenure toward challenges to secret immigration detentions and deportation hearings. Over the next seventeen years he also led the organization's litigation for marriage equality before New Jersey recognized same sex unions, defended a teenager arrested for recording police, challenged municipal fees imposed on demonstrators, and stopped the state's Motor Vehicle Commission from imposing REAL ID requirements without legislative approval. Under him, the ACLU of New Jersey said its legal department grew from a two person, mostly pro bono operation into a full time staff of eight, and the organization became the most frequent litigant, apart from government agencies, before the New Jersey Supreme Court.

His most consequential fight took aim at his own state's largest police force. In September 2010, Barocas helped lead a petition asking the United States Department of Justice to investigate the Newark Police Department, documenting 418 allegations of officer misconduct that included false arrests, excessive force and a broken internal affairs system. After the ACLU of New Jersey reported the DOJ's 2014 findings of a pattern of unconstitutional policing, Barocas said, "A partnership between the City of Newark and the Justice Department has the potential to change the police department forever, for the better." The city and the department signed a consent decree in March 2016, and a federal court entered it on May 5, 2016 after approving an independent monitor.

He also argued cases before the New Jersey Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and taught constitutional law at Rutgers Law School. Barocas retired as legal director in 2018, telling colleagues, "I'm proud of the hundreds of cases we've brought that have held the government accountable and protected people's rights." He then served six years on ACLU-NJ's Board of Trustees. In May 2019 the organization gave him its highest honor, the Roger N. Baldwin Award, and that June the New Jersey Law Journal named him its Attorney of the Year.

Away from the law, Barocas fronted a comedy rock parody group with musicians who had toured with Meat Loaf and Blood, Sweat and Tears, and one parody song reached a manager for Eminem, who helped produce a music video. In April 2026 he published a 338 page memoir, Chasing Justice and Butterflies: A Memoir of Overcoming and Becoming, tracing the same throughline from the tennis court to the courtroom.

Amol Sinha, the ACLU-NJ's executive director, called Barocas "a dear friend, incredible colleague and mentor, and champion for justice" who "dedicated his life and profession to protecting civil liberties." Of the Newark case, Sinha said Barocas "played a leading role in some of the most monumental civil rights victories of our time."

The consent decree he pushed for still shapes how Newark's police interact with the people they serve, and the legal department he grew from two lawyers into a working staff of eight continues to carry ACLU-NJ's cases through New Jersey's courts. His memoir put into words what his law practice had already argued in hundreds of filings: that a body built around limits could still find, case by case, a working angle for people the system was inclined to overlook.