There may be no résumé in Oregon public life more impressive than the one that belongs to Dave Frohnmayer.
Rhodes scholar, state attorney general, University of Oregon president: Frohnmayer is regarded not only as one of the state’s top legal minds but as someone who has fought for the public interest in venues ranging from the Oregon Legislature to the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Frohnmayer recently played another role far from the spotlight, as revealed in once-secret testimony in a major legal case against the state.
In that case, major tobacco companies challenged the state of Oregon’s right to continue receiving payments under a massive tobacco industry settlement.
And the star witness and paid expert for Big Tobacco against the state of Oregon: Dave Frohnmayer.
In April, Frohnmayer appeared as an expert witness on behalf of the tobacco companies in front of a closed-door arbitration panel in Chicago. The Oregon Department of Justice released Frohnmayer’s testimony to WW in response to a public records request. …
Oh boy. Here come Dave’s fans. They’re going to tell us that there’s no news here, etc. Yet, we are so heavily entrenched with HLGR (with way more than enough of the R), that this does matter and speaks to the potential network our campus leadership works within.
“Frohnmayer now works for the Eugene law firm of Harrang Long Gary Rudnick, which has represented Philip Morris in the past. He bills as much as $550 an hour (but declined to say how much tobacco companies paid him to testify). In addition, he gets a $257,000 annual pension from the Public Employees Retirement System and $101,000 a year as a part-time law professor at UO. (Harrang Long is also UO’s law firm, billing $647,000 since March 2012.)”
Trying to back out of the Master Settlement Agreement.
I’d be super interested to hear the compelling argument on why cigarette companies shouldn’t be held liable when they intentionally hid their own internal data about the dangers of smoking while investing in new research new chemical combinations to make cigarettes even more addictive, and intentionally marketing to young smokers and attempting to allow teens to have easy access to smoking.
But hey they sponsored a dataset known as the Tobacco attitudes behavior study which shows teen cigarette consumption is 50 to 70 percent lower than every other survey estimates. So we obviously trust their perspective.
Frohnmayer is cut from the same cloth as every other Oregon politician. Goldschmidt said it best when he fucked a 14 year old then sent her to Nevada. I forget what he said. So dreamy.