Pepperdine Law School Adds Some Starr Power

In the middle of the bookcase in his new office at the Pepperdine University School of Law, Kenneth W. Starr has a copy of Bill Clinton’s best-selling autobiography, “My Life.”

The book “is a remarkable story of the most talented man of politics of his generation,” said Starr, who guided the Whitewater investigation, which eventually focused on the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and led to Clinton’s impeachment.

Starr ought to know something about remarkable, albeit controversial, personal stories. His resume is studded with high-ranking posts dating to the Reagan and elder Bush administrations, including stints as the solicitor general in the Justice Department and as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. Before his probe into the Whitewater land deal expanded into a polarizing issue in U.S. politics and threatened Clinton’s presidency, Starr was talked about as a potential Republican nominee one day for the U.S. Supreme Court.

These days, Starr, 58, is spending most of his time far away from the action in Washington -- and, by some measures, in a much lower professional orbit. He will be formally installed today in a ceremony on Pepperdine’s Malibu campus as the dean of its middle-rung law school, ranked as tied for 99th among the 178 U.S. law schools assessed this year by U.S. News & World Report magazine.

Starr, who in recent years has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and federal appeals courts for an array of big corporations, plans to continue handling high-profile litigation. And he won’t rule out speaking out on behalf of political candidates or causes.

Still, Starr said he would keep politics out of his work at Pepperdine -- a Churches of Christ-affiliated university known for its conservatism -- and he wouldn’t let his outside legal assignments divert his attention from his “full-time job” at the law school.

“My task is to serve, and this is a wonderful opportunity of service,” said Starr, son of a Texas minister, who before studying law at Duke University considered going into the ministry or teaching college. “I’m helping as best I can to build the law school.”

Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel from 1994 to 1999, remains a controversial national figure. In “My Life,” Clinton accuses him of being biased, politically motivated and preoccupied with the former president’s sex life. (Starr declined to respond to those points.)

Starr’s appointment is generally regarded by Pepperdine and the broader legal community as a boon for the law school. It’s widely thought that he has potential to be a star in raising funds and in improving scholarship and teaching, along with attracting high-caliber faculty and students. The law school, founded in 1970, has more than 700 students and 35 professors who are tenured or on track toward earning tenure.

“Profile-wise, he’s going to be great, getting our name out there,” said Valerie Lopez, a third-year Pepperdine law student from Clifton, N.J. “We don’t have the highest reputation in comparison to other schools here, like UCLA or USC.”

Pepperdine previously offered Starr the role of dean over both its law and public policy schools in 1997, and he accepted, only to withdraw days later after the disclosure that he would leave the Whitewater probe in midstream created a furor. Starr said his change of plans had nothing to do with the public reaction, but with concerns raised by his Whitewater deputies that it would be “a premature departure” that could hurt the investigation.

Even erstwhile Starr critics such as legal ethics scholar Stephen Gillers, a professor and former vice dean at New York University’s law school, say that Pepperdine was smart to hire him. In the 1990s, Gillers lambasted Starr, contending that he was unfairly politicizing the Whitewater position.

Gillers also faulted Starr and his staff for improper or excessive legal tactics, including questioning former White House intern Lewinsky without her lawyers present and repeatedly calling Lewinsky’s mother to testify against her daughter.

All the same, Gillers said Starr otherwise has been an “astoundingly good lawyer” and that he would benefit Pepperdine by imparting his legal skills to students and giving the law school more exposure. “He is automatically the most famous law dean in the country,” Gillers said.

One dissenter is Charles Tiefer, deputy general counsel for the House of Representatives from 1984 to 1995 and now a law professor at the University of Baltimore.

He had professional contact with Starr in the early 1990s and remembers finding him gracious -- a word often used to describe the new Pepperdine dean, even if at odds with his public image. But Tiefer said he was dismayed later on when Starr worked as a lawyer for tobacco industry interests while he was running the Whitewater investigation.

“Ken Starr was deaf and blind to the sense of moral indignation about what the bar generally felt in the mid-1990s was the overzealous legal tactics used on behalf of the tobacco industry,” Tiefer said. “I question whether he is the best role model for the students.”

Soon after his selection was announced in April, Starr visited the campus and started assuaging concerns about his Whitewater past. As law student Lopez recalls it, he brought up Whitewater without being asked during an informal chat session.

“He spoke to us and he explained his perspective on the whole issue,” she said. “I was satisfied. He said he was asked to do a job and he did it to the best of his capacity.... Some people think he’s too conservative, but I think he’s in line with what Pepperdine is.”

Starr says he “fell in love” with Pepperdine when he first visited the oceanfront campus in 1991 as a stand-in at a campus event for then-U.S. Atty. Gen. Richard L. Thornburgh. His ties to the university deepened after he returned for several summers as a visiting law professor.

When the law school deanship opened up again last school year, Starr prevailed among a field of on-campus and off-campus candidates. Pepperdine President Andrew K. Benton said he weighed the hiring decision carefully.

“All things being equal, I avoid controversy,” Benton said. “But to the extent that I’m able, I need to be wise to look beyond short-term issues, and it was very easy to do that with Ken Starr.”

Starr, who with his wife, Alice, is buying an on-campus condominium while also maintaining a home in northern Virginia, frequently cites Pepperdine’s “welcoming ecumenically Christian” atmosphere.

He emphasized what he said was the school’s openness to professors and students of other religious backgrounds, enthusiastically mentioning a recent article in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles about the increasingly active Jewish community at the law school, including an orthodox rabbi on the faculty.

He said he aims to strengthen the scholarship produced by the law school’s faculty but while preserving existing strengths, such as the work performed by its Institute for Dispute Resolution. “In our faith tradition, blessed are the peacemakers,” Starr said.

Starr declined to reply to specific criticisms of his handling of the Whitewater probe, which continued for six years at a cost of $70 million. It led to a string of guilty pleas and convictions, but did not find evidence to bring charges against Clinton or his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in connection with the real estate dealings that were the original basis for the case. Clinton also escaped conviction in the historic impeachment case that grew out of Whitewater.

Instead, Starr offered a general defense of Whitewater. “I’m satisfied that the investigation was conducted with honor and integrity and the facts as found by the investigation have been shown to have been of relevance and possibly importance to the country,” he said.

As for his legal work for the tobacco industry, Starr said, “I believe our system depends upon vigorous representation of client perspectives, and the issues that I’ve been called upon to be involved in ... are, I believe, important for the law generally.”

Starr said he doesn’t know whether his public image will be a hindrance in his new role. “I just try to be friendly, and treat every person with respect and dignity, and I don’t talk politics,” he said.

Providing a perspective on how he might view his own legal career, Starr said one of his main goals at Pepperdine is to produce lawyers willing to take on unpopular causes.

“The model we lift up is Atticus Finch,” Starr said, referring to the small-town Southern lawyer in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” who struggled against racial injustice.

“You take on responsibilities that may not necessarily meet with universal approval. But you seek to discharge those responsibilities with integrity.”