Lifetime Service Award 2018
By Adair Law
The U.S. District Court of Oregon Historical Society is pleased to honor Barnes H. Ellis with its Lifetime Service Award. This article is based on research, interviews, and conversations with Barnes and his colleagues. A briefer version of this article appears in the paper Oregon Benchmarks Fall 2018 Winter 2019.
Learning about the full, varied life of Barnes Ellis is like going to a large, happily provisioned picnic. A big group of able cooks have filled several picnic tables to overflowing. Appetites are sharpened and curious for what will be served. A guest senses a certain enjoyment in the hard work that made the picnic happen. The hosts make sure all guests have a strong chance to get to the table. The bug bites, knocked-over glasses, and surprises are handled. The affable company helps with the cleanup. There is a pervading sense of optimism and gusto for all of it.
As the third of four children of Raymond W. Ellis and Eleanor Gwin Ellis, Barnes was born in 1940 and his negotiating skills may have started very early. Ray (1908-80) was born in Charles City, Iowa, the younger of two sons of a banker and tractor manufacturer father and a mother who played organ at the original little brown church in the vale popularized by the song “Church in the Wildwood.” Eleanor Gwin (1912-79) was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, youngest of four daughters and one son. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a homemaker and later a real estate developer, with a keen interest in planting large oak trees along the town’s beautiful boulevard. Ray and Eleanor met in 1930 when he was included in a group of Yale classmates her brother Sam brought for a visit to his Mississippi home. Eleanor (or “Gwin” as she was known outside her family) was a 1933 graduate of Northwestern University in Illinois with a BS in psychology. After Yale, Ray attended Harvard Law School, and practiced corporate law in Boston with the firm of Choate, Hall and Stewart.
During the early years of World War II, the family lived in Weston, Massachusetts. Ray commuted home on weekends from Navy officer training in Quonset, Rhode Island. He shipped out of San Diego to serve in the Pacific as an air combat intelligence officer on the staff of Adm. Felix Stump. He played a significant role in the October 25, 1944 Battle off Samar Island. This was part of the epic Battle of Leyte Gulf, a near-disaster for the U.S. Navy when a communications confusion left the San Bernardino Straits unguarded, allowing the Japanese Center Force under Adm. Takeo Kurita to pass through undetected. Anticipating that possibility, during the night Ray recommended his small carrier force arm its planes with torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs that helped cause the Japanese to reverse course. For their actions Ray was awarded the Bronze Star, and Admiral Stump was awarded the Navy Cross.
Education
After the war, the family moved to Marblehead, Massachusetts. Barnes started his education in the Marblehead public schools, being taught by several wonderful Irish Catholic single women in their mid-50s. There was lots of memorization and to this day he can recite the 26 helping verbs and several verses of “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Longfellow. An early lesson he recalls from his parents: “Love your siblings. Because, as life unfolds, they may be your closest friends. That’s certainly how it’s worked out for us.”
Barnes has described himself as “educationally privileged.” In 1953 he began four years at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He became a goalie on the lacrosse team and was named captain, MVP and All-New England first team his senior year. He enjoyed singing and was a second bass in the glee club, the choir, and in an a capella double-quartet. In 1956, he applied to the American Field Service summer abroad program and was assigned to Norway. On the Atlantic ship’s voyage, he befriended two young men from Oregon who were also headed to Norway. In August, the Norwegian group joined with some 600 other students in Paris for a gathering before boarding ship back to the U.S. Barnes was strolling the Champs Élysée with his Oregon friend Bill Farrens when Bill spied an Oregon City girl he knew. Molly Cleland was buying a bottle of Je Reviens in a small perfume shop. Bill introduced them, and Barnes was instantly smitten. Later in the day, he and Molly shared a taxi ride back to the Lysée Michelet where the AFS students were staying. Barnes used his “limited Exeter French” to instruct the driver. He recalls, “My new friend did not make a point of the fact that she spoke the language fluently.” It was the start of a connection that extended over the voyage home and ultimately for a lifetime.
Barnes returned to Exeter and went from being an okay student to an honor student. His teachers and visiting lecturers, (ranging from Robert Frost to Robert Oppenheimer) ignited a new curiosity about the larger world. In 1957 he entered Yale. He continued as a lacrosse goalie, and in senior year was team captain, MVP, All-New England, and honorable mention All-American. Looking back on his lacrosse days, Barnes sees the sport as good life training. Nervous at the start of most games, he learned how to control his anxiety. He understood that goaltending required complete attention to what was happening around and beyond him, since a goalie’s mistake is immediate and painful to the entire team. Preparation and concentration were vital.
Barnes continued his interest in singing and is a member of the Class of 1961 Whiffenpoofs (the country’s oldest collegiate a capella group). His friend, Bart Giamatti (future president of Yale and commissioner of Major League Baseball) took him to the Italian section of New Haven and introduced him to an unfamiliar food; pizza.
During his first two years he participated in Directed Studies, a seminar cluster of courses combining history, graphic arts, science, and literature. He especially enjoyed American history with Professor Martin Duberman and art history with Professor Vincent Scully. He wrote two or three papers a week, which was a great stimulus to reading with focus. An English literature major, he considered pursuing a doctorate and teaching, but says the world was spared from that when he decided to study law instead.
Barnes and Molly maintained contact through letters. In the summer of 1959, Barnes saw Molly again when he found work as a farm hand on the Ridgefield, Washington farm of Aubrey and Constance Morgan. Aubrey was Welsh, a former cricketer, and a former senior officer in the British Information Service where he worked on U.S. public opinion towards Great Britain. His work included orchestrating Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s several U.S. visits during the war. Constance (Morrow) Morgan was a graduate and trustee of Smith College. Her sister Anne was a well-known author and married to the aviator Charles Lindbergh. Their father, Dwight Morrow, an Amherst classmate of Calvin Coolidge, had been a very successful U.S. Ambassador to Mexico.
Barnes recalls, “The Morgans liked to have college kids work on the farm by day and discuss world affairs at night.” A hard day’s work could end with fascinating conversation over brandy and cigars in the evening. The Morgans took him on trips to Ashland, Central Oregon, and to Grand Coulee, Washington. Barnes liked what he saw of the region and he continued to court Molly Cleland, who he was able to see several times during the summer.
Barnes graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1961. He worked that summer in Washington, D.C. at Food for Peace, headed by a recently-defeated South Dakota member of Congress named George McGovern (the future U.S. Senator and 1972 Democratic nominee for president). Barnes had space in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House during the “Camelot” period of the Kennedy presidency. From there he drove west for his first year of law study at Stanford Law while Molly completed her master’s degree in education. They were married in August 1962 in Oregon City. The couple moved east and Barnes finished his law studies at Harvard.
Barnes recalls, “Harvard Law was serious work, but I did well and enjoyed learning the field.” He made law review at both Stanford and Harvard. Working on the Harvard Law Review introduced him to several of his brightest classmates—including future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer, Yale law professor Owen Fiss, and First Circuit Judge Michael Boudin. Molly taught high school French in Medford, Massachusetts, but when she told the school that she was expecting their first child, she was required to stop teaching because the school thought it would be awkward for the students to be taught by a pregnant woman. Their first child, Cynthia, was born in July 1963.
Setting Portland Roots
In 1963, Barnes accepted a summer associate position with the largest firm (30 attorneys) in Portland—Hart, Rockwood, Davies, Biggs, and Strayer. After graduating magna cum laude Harvard Law in 1964, he became an associate in the firm. Along with a high standard of work, involvement in the community was a firm priority. Barnes joined the Portland City Club almost immediately (in later years he spent two terms on the board of governors). He participated in cultural panel discussions on local TV. He volunteered with the ACLU. When asked about the challenges of his early years as an attorney, Barnes recalls, “Everything was a challenge, but also an opportunity. I did a range of practice areas from 1964-67, including corporate, tax, as well as some litigation.” Children Barnes C. (1965) and Mary (1967) joined the family .
Barnes’ early mentors at the firm were Manley Strayer and George Fraser (LSA recipient, 2010). Manley Strayer (1906-85) was born in Baker City, Oregon and attended Willamette University where he took both undergraduate and law courses. He passed the bar exam but had to delay admission to the bar until he turned 21. After years spent practicing in Baker City in a variety of capacities, he came to Portland to work as an assistant U.S. attorney, and then worked in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He joined the firm as a partner in 1942. He was widely regarded as one of Oregon’s great trial attorneys. Iowa-born
George Fraser (1917-2011) joined the firm in 1946 after serving in the U.S. Navy and attending Harvard Law School. Barnes found George to be a wonderfully creative lawyer. “He would come up with five out-of-the-box ideas. Four of them would be ridiculous, but one would be brilliant.” As the occasional beneficiary of Fraser’s gentle deflating when it came to working with hot-tempered adversaries, Barnes also appreciated his people and management skills.
Talking about his early work as an attorney, Barnes recalls that a good way for a new lawyer to get time in court “was to volunteer to represent indigent criminal defendants. You don’t get paid much, but my firm was very supportive.” Gideon v. Wainwright was decided by the Supreme Court in 1963 and it would have a profound impact on Barnes’ career. In 1966, the Due Process Committee of the ACLU of Oregon initiated a study of the Portland Municipal Court. Barnes chaired the committee and their report, published in April 1967, was referred to as “scorching.” Recommendations included: transfer of all state cases from the municipal docket to the Multnomah County District Court docket; removal of drunk cases and creation of a “detoxification facility;” provision of a public defender for indigent defendants; and physical removal of the court facilities from the Police Bureau building
White House Fellow
In 1964, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John Gardner started the White House Fellows program. The program’s goal was to provide several promising young Americans with first-hand, high-level experience in the federal government. It was hoped that they would return to their communities with a sense of personal involvement in the leadership of society. Fellows earned a full-time salary serving as assistants to senior White House staff, the vice president, and cabinet members. Barnes applied, and after regional and national interviews, he was chosen to be a White House Fellow. He, Molly, and their three children under age five moved to McLean, Virginia in August 1967.
Barnes’ WHF class consisted of 13 men and three women. One fellow was Doris Kearns, a doctoral student in government at Harvard, who became the writer and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Thinking back over 50 years of friendship with Barnes, in October 2018 she recalled “What a time it was to be in government service. There was a sense pervading Washington then that you could work on big goals and public service would lead to things that would be remembered forever….You went to bed at night knowing that something great had happened that day.” Doris worked in the Labor Department and later in the White House; Barnes worked in the Department of Justice with Attorney General Ramsey Clark. At the Department of Justice he also worked with Warren Christopher (later Secretary of State under President Carter) and Erwin Griswold (Harvard Law School Dean, 1946-67, Solicitor General 1967-73 and who, Barnes says, was unfairly portrayed in the recent film On the Basis of Sex relating to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg).
The nation was going through a fraught period during Barnes’ time as a White House Fellow. He saw the October 1967 anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon. The Tet Offensive took place in January 1968. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, he saw National Guard troops at every street corner in D.C. because of fear of riots. During meetings with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Barnes remembers the candidate being more focused on the Iowa caucuses than on the Fair Housing legislation he was there to discuss. Barnes worked on gun control legislation and on the night Senator Kennedy was killed, he received a call at home asking him to come in to the office because President Johnson wanted to be able to assure the country he had a legislative response to the tragedy.
As a White House Fellow, Barnes tried to connect with all the major divisions in the Department of Justice. He argued a tax appeal to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. He traveled to Houston for the Civil Rights Division to investigate hiring practices at Joske’s Department Store. He went to Cleveland in connection with a racial discrimination case against the local IBEW union. He was very involved in lobbying for the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited racial discrimination in housing, and attended the signing ceremony the week after Dr. King’s assassination. Barnes came away with a fairly positive attitude towards most of the people in government he had met. “It did stimulate my already strong interest in wanting to combine law practice with public service.”
In November 1968, he rejoined Molly and the children, who had returned earlier to Portland. The family expanded with two more daughters, Joy (1969), Heidi (1972) and son Curtis (1979). Barnes has said “Having a child—or more than one child—is an expression of optimism. We were, and are, very optimistic.” Molly ran the household and returned to teaching in 1989 when she became the librarian at the newly-started Arbor School of Arts and Science in Tualatin.
Starting the Change
On his return to Portland, Barnes carried with him the notion that “one of the joys of being a lawyer is you can be involved in the community and do a range of activity that, hopefully, is helpful.” He was a member of the executive board of the ACLU of Oregon which, in April 1969, demanded that the municipal court stop using “continued indefinitely” case dispositions. In a May 1969 Oregonian article, Barnes noted: “The municipal court judges have acknowledged, as we revealed in our 1967 study of the court, that this sentencing practice is continued solely because city police erroneously believe it will insulate them from claims of unlawful arrest.” Later that month Multnomah County DA George Van Hoomissen announced he would no longer prosecute state cases in municipal court and would move them to the state district court, as urged in the 1967 report chaired by Barnes. In 1971 the Portland Municipal Court was merged into the district court, again following the recommendation of the 1967 report.
In October 1969, the Multnomah Bar Association received a small planning grant for a community-based public defender office. The grant was from the Oregon Law Enforcement Council, formed to administer block grants to the state under the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act of 1968, part of President Johnson’s “Great Society.” Barnes was appointed to OLEC by Governor Tom McCall. He became a member of a three-person Multnomah Bar Association committee that used the planning grant to form Metropolitan Public Defenders, Inc. It was MPD that started a public defender office first for the Portland Municipal Court, then state courts in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties, and also for the U.S. District Court. In June 1971, as a member of the initial MPD Board, Barnes hired James D. Hennings, a former Multnomah County Deputy DA, to be Executive Director of MPD, a position he held for nearly 40 years. Barnes served on the MPD board for 30 years, most of them as chair.
Barnes has always been interested in the dispute side of the law. He describes the dispute side as drawing on “a skill set that I felt okay with. It requires a lot of analysis, preparation, focus, and you’re dealing with people at a moment of stress in their lives. I’ve always found that not just interesting, but important.” He pursued his work with zeal, continuing to learn from the trial attorneys at his firm and outside it.
He worked with George Fraser in 1970 for the Bend forest products firm Brooks-Scanlon against the engineering firm CH2M Hill, on a case arising out of claimed defects in a wood waste burning boiler. Their opponent was the leading trial lawyer in Central Oregon, Owen Panner (who would become a federal judge in 1980). After the jury was selected and the trial had started, Fraser and Panner reached agreement on a settlement while mucking out horse stalls on Panner’s farm. The settlement amount was large enough to need approval from the underwriters at Lloyd’s of London. At that time, overseas communication was done by telegram with the process taking two to three days. Because it was also chukar hunting season in Bend, neither side wanted to stop the trial. Panner proceeded to do a very slow cross exam of the first witness. He spoke slowly, repetitively, asked innocuous questions, and did what looked like a very poor job. The jury looked utterly bored. Two days later the doors in the back of the courtroom burst open, a messenger rushed in with a note, handed it to the clerk, who gave it to the judge. He read it, waited a few minutes, and then calmly declared a recess. The settlement had been accepted and everyone could go home. In later years Barnes enjoyed razzing Owen Panner (who was rightly proud of his trial lawyering skills) about the lousy cross-exam technique he’d witnessed.
“Every case was a challenge”
Through the decades Barnes worked on a range of business cases. He handled several major antitrust cases including: United States v. Champion International, et al. involving timber bidding in the North Santiam; Selectron v. AT&T involving telephone terminal equipment; Healthco v. A-dec Corp. involving dental equipment; Stihl American, Inc. v. Omark Industries involving saw chain imports; Community Press v. Gannett Corp. involving a claim of newspaper monopolization in Salem; and Portland Retail Druggists Assn. v. Abbot Labs, et al. involving drug pricing (a case ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court). Another genre of cases Barnes handled involved corporate governance in closely-held companies, including several Portland-area family-owned companies: Delaney v. Georgia-Pacific; Zidell v. Zidell, Inc. et al; Naito v. Naito; Chiles v. Fred Meyer, Inc.; Tifft v. Stevens involving a plastic injection molding manufacturer; and Teledesic, a Seattle-based satellite communications company majority-owned by Craig McCaw and Bill Gates. Publicly-held company securities litigation was another major area of Barnes’ practice, including cases involving: Cryofreeze Products, Inc., TiLine, Inc., Data Pacific Corporation, Floating Point Systems, Inc., Melridge, Inc., Sequent Computer, Inc., Digimarc Corporation, Protocol Systems, Inc., Mentor Graphics, Inc., Hollywood Video, Inc., Assisted Living Concepts, Inc., Tektronix, Inc., Eagle Hardware Co., and Flir Systems, Inc. He also did work in hostile tender offers (including Pactrust, Security Bank, and Telephone Utilities, Inc.) and several flip-side “going private” cases (Carolina-Pacific, Pacific Telecom, Inc.).
Barnes also handled several major construction and product design cases including PGE et. al. v. Bechtel Corporation (relating to the Trojan Nuclear Plant Control Building shear wall design); Burgess Construction v. Riedel, Inc. (involving two joint venture projects in Alaska); Fred Meyer, Inc. v. A.T. Kearney (involving conversion of a central mainframe to a distributed computer system); Cook v. Salishan Properties, Inc. (involving homeowner claims from coastal erosion); Bohemia Lumber Co. v. Goodyear Aerospace (involving aerodynamic logging balloons). There were cases involving consumers (Farmers Insurance under the Fair Credit Reporting Act), employer groups (Frohnmayer vs. SAIF), wage and hour class actions (Farmers Insurance), the 1989 savings and loan legislation (FDIC v. Far West), and shopping center ownership disputes (Lloyd Center and Wilsonville Shopping Center).
Unlike many trial lawyers, Barnes briefed and argued many of his own appeals, including approximately 20 oral arguments before the Oregon Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “As I reflect on it, trial practice was a good fit for me for several reasons. I liked the variety—I came to know virtually every major industry and company and their managements in the region, and I was able to handle cases in a wide range of legal areas…. Every case was a challenge requiring full focus and attention—no coasting.”
Breaking the Logjam
In the early 1970s the Portland City Club twice failed to get the required 60 percent vote to admit women. Barnes, along with several others, withdrew from the club in protest, but rejoined in 1973 once women were admitted. The 2005 book Stoel Rives, LLP: A History, describes the transition in the 1970s involving the addition of numerous women lawyers and Barnes’ role in the process. He worked closely with Karen Creason, who defined the role of paralegal while she was working her way through law school. After getting her degree summa cum laude from Lewis & Clark Law School in 1974, she became an associate and later a partner. Barnes and Karen teamed up on several major cases together before she pioneered a practice in health care law.
According to the firm history, “This chauvinistic logjam at the Davies Biggs firm and its predecessors did not break up significantly until the 1970s, when the dam burst.” Barnes was a member of the hiring committee for four years in the late 1970s when he and other committee colleagues hired many members of the pioneer generation of women lawyers, including Susan Graber (a future Ninth Circuit judge), Susan Hammer, Chris Kitchel, Joyce Harpole, Ruth Beyer, Peggy Noto, Lois Rosenbaum, Margaret Baumgartner, Nancy Cowgill, and later Margaret Kirkpatrick, Joan Snyder, Bev Pearman, and Katherine McDowell, to name a few. When Davies Biggs merged with the Rives firm in 1986, Pam Jacklin and Gail Achterman became partners. “I was just blown away at the quality of young women coming out of law school wanting to enter the legal profession. And we hired a significant number. Not out of any sense of political correctness, not out of any sense of ‘I’m gonna right a wrong.’ It was strictly, these were the best qualified people in the market. So, it was not hard.”
Susan Hammer, now a mediator, recalls her 1977 hiring. “My first impression of Barnes was that he was joyful and optimistic….The greatest gift that a partner can give to an associate is giving her challenging, meaty, interesting work that will help her grow as a lawyer…. I learned from Barnes how to find the interesting parts of every case and how to dig into it, to be somewhat of a quick study, and try to figure out how to solve a problem.” Hammer also recalls that if one of Barnes’ clients was reluctant to have a woman lawyer, “He dealt with it swiftly and unequivocally…. I think it really helped the women that he was working with to know that they had that kind of support.”
Future Federal Judge Anna J. Brown came to know of Barnes while she working as a law clerk (1978-80) for Multnomah County Circuit Judge John C. (Jack) Beatty Jr. during the day and attending Lewis & Clark Law School at night. Judge Beatty heard a wide range of cases and Judge Brown remembers: “He took a lot of care in training his law clerks to be lawyers, so when he saw a lawyer doing something noteworthy in performance or in the way that a lawyer was representing a client, he would always point the lawyer out. And that’s when I first heard of Mr. Ellis, which is how I knew him then. He was admired by the judge I worked for.”
After receiving her law degree, she remembers seeing Barnes during her early years as an attorney. “He was always very encouraging. He would see me on the street, ‘How are you doing, are you trying cases, are you getting chances to do what you wanted to do?’ That meant a lot.” Brown became a district court judge in 1992, a circuit court judge in 1994 and joined the federal bench in 1999. “Seeing how he treated everybody with respect, if at arm’s length, you know, if it was an opponent. There was always a fundamental professional courtesy. If a witness was sneaking away from him on a line of questioning, he managed to bring him right back with a document, page 4, line 2. He would never raise his voice, he wouldn’t get upset. He was just a good example of what you would hope would happen in a courtroom. A really earnest and hard-fought presentation of conflicting arguments and facts. But then accepting what the outcome was.”
Pushing Boulders Up Hills
The Oregon Judicial Branch Commission was created in September 1979 to make a comprehensive study of the structure of the state’s judicial system. Governor Vic Atiyeh, Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Arno Denecke, Senate President Jason Boe, and House Speaker Hardy Myers chose a committee that included Barnes and Judge Jack Beatty along with attorneys, legislators, and businessmen from around the state. Barnes was appointed to the commission by Governor Atiyeh and elected chair by its members. The commission looked at a range of different areas, and made two principal recommendations: first, integrate management of the court system under the leadership of the chief justice (rather than have an autonomous court in each of the 36 counties); and second, have the state assume responsibility for indigent defense (which the counties were having difficulty sustaining). The bill passed both houses by comfortable margins. But there was a hitch regarding the appointment of the chief justice. The commission suggested the governor appoint the chief justice, rather than the court which traditionally went by seniority, because it seemed more likely to produce an able administrator. The senior justice at the time (a former state senator) successfully lobbied the Legislature to remove that provision and to the commission’s shock, in August 1981 Governor Atiyeh vetoed the entire package because of that one change.
Judge Beatty then proposed that Governor Atiyeh call a special session and re-enact the bills, with the issue of how to choose a chief justice referred to the voters for a decision in May 1982. In what was referred to at the time (October 1981) as the shortest special session in the state’s history, the bills were re-enacted, and the governor signed. (Oregon voters later decided to let the justices continue selecting the chief justice rather than the governor.)
In 1999, Chief Justice Wally Carson called on Barnes to chair a commission created by the Legislature to propose restructuring the state’s indigent defense program. Others on this commission included Senator Kate Brown (future governor), Judge Dave Brewer from Lane County (later an Oregon Supreme Court Justice), the executive director of Lane County Public Defenders, a district attorney, and the executive director of the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Ann Christian, from the State Court Administrator’s Office, led the staff. The commission recommended that a new Public Defense Services Commission be created by the Legislature, with its members to be appointed by the chief justice (who would also serve as a non-voting member). The Legislature agreed, and Chief Justice Carson appointed Barnes as chair of PDSC.
Reappointed by successive Chief Justices Paul DeMuniz and Tom Balmer, Barnes chaired PDSC from 2001 until he stepped down in 2015. Current State Court Administrator Nancy Cozine worked with Barnes for over six years when she was executive director of the Office of Public Defense Services. She recalls that Barnes inspired her and many others she worked with “to be better, work harder, and make sure that everything we did for our clients—whether it was the state or a corporation or an individual who was poor and helpless—to make sure that we provided representation and services as if our own lives were on the line.” She also speaks with wonder about his level of energy and commitment, “from the 1960s all the way through, until 2015….look at all the boulders he was able to push up hills.”
“Something inside me said ‘Just say yes.’”
In 2005 Barnes volunteered to assist Portland-based Mercy Corps, an international humanitarian nongovernmental organization, to raise funds for its new building. He let CEO Neal Keny-Guyer know that he would be happy to be of further assistance, if needed. Davis Wright Tremaine attorney Bob Newell, who had been a Mercy Corps board member since its early days in 1979, called Barnes, who was out of town, in January 2010, He told Barnes of a legal issue Mercy Corps was facing. They decided to meet on Saturday at 8 a.m. It was the morning after Barnes’ 70th birthday.
Within a few minutes of starting the meeting, Neal Keny-Guyer asked “Would you like to be our general counsel?” It was totally unexpected. Barnes recalls, “Any rational person would have asked a lot of questions and would want to discuss the issue with his law firm and family. But something inside me said ‘Just say yes’—which is what I did.”
He took his head and his heart out of the courtroom and put them into some of the world’s toughest places. “Places,” as Neal Keny-Guyer says, “where poor governance, conflict, insecurity and extreme poverty collide to trap people.” Mercy Corps works to address short-term emergency relief issues and to build long-term resilience. Barnes began serving as general counsel in 2010 and now serves as senior legal counsel. Keny-Guyer notes, “Barnes is the epitome of finding ways to get the important things done, solving problems, and/or navigating through. In our world, which has tons of complexity, he’s among the best at that.” Mercy Corps has annual revenues of about $500,000,000 and is active in over 40 countries. One of his areas of focus has been Mercy Corps’ legacy of micro-finance institutions formed in the 1990s. These institutions serve a mission of financial inclusion, enabling small unit farmers and others to have access to financial services. In recent years, Barnes has assisted Mercy Corps selling its equity yet preserving the social mission. Keny-Guyer praises Barnes. “ He’s been absolutely so creative in ensuring that with these legal entities with our financial institutions, we’re able to achieve our mission, get back some of the investment that we put into it, and that these entities preserve and keep their social mission. Absolutely incredible.”
“It’s what makes life full and rich”
Barnes served on the Oregon State Bar Board of Governors from 1974-77, when the Client Security Fund and Professional Liability Fund were established. He was inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers in 1980. In 1997 Barnes received the Learned Hand Award from the American Jewish Federation. That same year he was named an honorary alumnus of Lewis and Clark Law School and has served on its board of visitors since that time. In 2015 he received the Oregon State Bar President’s Award for Public Service. He received the Ken Morrow Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 from the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. The award recognizes the lifelong commitment and significant achievements of attorneys working in the defense community and those who have made important contributions to the administration of justice. It was at that award ceremony that Judge Anna Brown first heard a comprehensive accounting of the range of the achievements of “Mr. Ellis” over the decades she has known him. She says, “As much as we all admire Barnes—those of us who’ve had a chance to see him in his professional role in a variety of capacities—you would never know there is something to admire if you just waited for Barnes to tell the story of himself.”
When asked about his work life, Barnes replied, “I’ve always felt that the role of a lawyer is to be a good citizen. The benefit is that you’re not just locked in to one business, you get to deal with a range of clients and the issues that they have, and you get to deal with things in the community where maybe you can make a difference. It’s not that I feel an obligation to do that, it’s what makes life full and rich. That’s what I’ve enjoyed.”
In his leisure hours, Barnes is an avid reader (lots of American history), a sometimes-successful vegetable gardener, and an amateur carpenter. From 1997 to 2002 he and his family did much of the work themselves on the family beach house in Cove Beach. At the picnic of Barnes’ life, he could grow the salad and build the picnic table. Judge Brown describes him as “A truly quiet and humble person. Hilariously funny, smart as a whip, willing to be patient and to teach people, but not sing his own symphony.” If a choir was to sing Barnes’ praises, some strong voices might come from his extended family with its six children and 12 grandchildren. Barnes notes, “It’s just been a pleasure and opportunity to work with all of them.”
Barnes Ellis, the U.S. District Court of Oregon Historical Society is profoundly grateful for your service to our state and to the legal community.