P. Cameron DeVore, an attorney who helped establish the field of media law and was one of the first to successfully argue that advertising was a form of speech protected by the Constitution, died Sunday at his home on Lopez Island, near Seattle. He was 76.
The cause of death was believed to be a heart attack, said Bruce Johnson, a longtime colleague and partner at the Seattle-based law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, of which DeVore was a founder.
"He was a mentor to the entire profession of 1st Amendment lawyers," said Johnson, who knew DeVore for more than 30 years. "He was very active in laying the ground floor in what became the 1st Amendment media bar" devoted to defending news organizations against libel lawsuits and other types of liability.
He had a particular interest in freedom of commercial speech and was an early champion of it. In 1975, he successfully defended an ad that said that Imperial margarine was "not butter -- it's better than butter," a line that provoked the ire of butter manufacturers in Washington state. DeVore persuaded the court that the margarine company had a right to use the word "butter" in its advertising.
DeVore laid out these ideas in "Advertising and Commercial Speech: A First Amendment Guide," co-written with Robert Sack, a New York federal judge.
A widely circulated treatise first published in 1999, it provides a historical overview of 30 major Supreme Court decisions since the 1970s that have addressed the legal questions surrounding advertising and other communication used to sell or rent products.
He and Sack began lecturing on the topic in the early 1970s, "when the accepted wisdom was that advertising and commercial speech simply did not have constitutional protection," Sack said Tuesday. "The U.S. Supreme Court in the 1970s began to change that. Cam and I became the reporters to the legal community of the changes," which established the right to advertise of a wide array of companies and professionals, including condom makers, drug manufacturers and lawyers.
DeVore was born April 25, 1932, in Great Falls, Mont. "He often said, 'We carry printers' ink in our veins,' " Johnson recalled, a reference to DeVore's father, a newspaper editor.
A 1954 graduate of Yale University, DeVore earned a master's at Cambridge University in 1956 and a law degree from Harvard in 1961, when he joined the firm Wright, Innis, Simon & Todd in Seattle.
