Hardy Myers

Hardy Myers (October 25, 1939 – November 29, 2016) was an American lawyer and Democratic politician who served three terms as the 15th attorney general of the state of Oregon, United States.

Myers was born October 25, 1939, in Electric Mills, Mississippi.

He moved with his family to Bend in central Oregon in 1943 where his father, a lumberman, became manager of the Shevlin-Hixon Lumber Company, one of the two large mills that used to operate on the Deschutes River.

His family then moved to Prineville in 1951.

He attended public schools until graduation from high school.

After high school, he attended the University of Mississippi, where he received his undergraduate degree with distinction in 1961.

Myers returned to Oregon to continue on to law school at the University of Oregon School of Law in Eugene, earning a LL.B. in 1964.

While at the University of Oregon he became Phi Eta Sigma (freshman scholastic honorary), Phi Kappi Phi (undergraduate scholastic honorary), Omicron Delta Kappa (undergraduate leadership honorary).

He was also on the Board of Editors of the Oregon Law Review.

Myers clerked for a year to United States District Judge William G. East in 1964–65.

During that time, East made national headlines for ordering U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to show why an Oregon lawyer should not be paid for defending a criminal defendant he had been ordered to defend by the federal court.

In what Time magazine said was "may be the neatest constitutional argument of the year", East justified the expenditure under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Myers was an attorney with Stoel Rives – Oregon's largest private law firm – in Portland for 31 years.

He first came to the firm in 1965, when it was known Davies, Biggs, Strayer, Stoel and Boley.

At Stoel Rives, his practice specialties were labor and employment law, and government affairs law.

He was a member of the Oregon State Bar and Multnomah County Bar Association and was admitted to practice before the United States District Court for the District of Oregon and United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Myers' public career began as president of the Portland City Planning Commission, where he served from 1973 to 1974.

He first ran for, and was elected to, the Oregon House of Representatives in the 1974 elections representing what was then House District 19 (parts of NE and SE Portland).

Myers twice served as chair for the Committee on Judiciary, first from 1977 to 1978 and once again from 1983 to 1984.

In that time he was rated most outstanding member of Oregon Legislature in The Oregonian 1979 and 1981 surveys of legislative observers (no 1983 survey); rated most outstanding metro area State Representative in Willamette Week surveys of legislative observers in 1977, 1979, 1981 and 1983.

He became speaker of the house in 1979.

As speaker of the Oregon House in 1981, he spearheaded the effort for a state takeover of trial-court operations in all of the state's counties starting in 1983.

Chair, Oregon Jail Project, 1984–86 (appointed by Association of Oregon Counties).

He served as in the House until 1985.

He left elected office for a time in 1985 and was elected Councilor to the Metropolitan Service District (now Metro), serving from 1985 to 1986.

Chair, Citizens' Task Force on Mass Transit Policy, 1985–86 (appointed by TriMet Board of Directors).

He went on to become chairman of the Oregon Criminal Justice Council in 1987 and was appointed to the State Sentencing Guidelines Board by then Governor Neil Goldschmidt.

In that capacity he led the effort in 1989 to set state guidelines for felony sentencing.

Chair, Portland Future Focus (city strategic planning process), 1990–91 (appointed by Mayor Bud Clark).

Myers appointed by Metropolitan Service District Executive Officer Rena Cusma to serve as chair of the Metro Charter Committee.

This was a statutory committee which prepared the charter for the Portland metropolitan area regional government for the 1992 ballot.

The charter was subsequently approved by the voters in the November general elections.

Those guidelines remain in effect, though voters set mandatory minimum prison sentences for some violent crimes through Measure 11 in 1994.

Chair, Governor's Task Force on State Employee Benefits, 1994 (appointed by Governor Barbara Roberts).

Co-chair, Governor's Task Force on State Employee Compensation, 1995 (appointed by Governor John Kitzhaber).

Prior to running for the state's Attorney General position in 1996, Myers had considered trying for the position for some time but did not want to run against Dave Frohnmayer who held the position in the 1980s, or against fellow Democrat former neighbor Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who was elected to the AG office in 1992.

When Kulongoski ran in 1996 for the Oregon Supreme Court, Myers "it was now or never."

if he wanted to run for the position.

Myers defeated Kevin Mannix of Salem in the 1996 primary, when Mannix was a Democrat.

Prior to taking office in 1997, he served from 1975 to 1985 in the Oregon House of Representatives, the last four of those years as its speaker, and was also a Metro councilor and chaired the Oregon Criminal Justice Council.