Starr to Head Pepperdine’s Law School

Kenneth W. Starr, the former independent counsel who investigated President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, will become the next dean of the law school at Pepperdine University.

The appointment marks the second time Starr has been chosen to head the Malibu law school. He accepted the post in 1997 but withdrew before he could start work because his investigation of the Clintons had expanded.

In a statement, Pepperdine President Andrew K. Benton called Starr’s appointment one of the most important in the university’s 67-year history.

Starr was out of the country and unavailable to comment, Pepperdine officials said.

After resigning in 1999 as independent counsel on the investigation that began with the Clintons’ role in the Whitewater real estate venture, Starr returned to work in the Washington, D.C., office of Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm where he had been a partner since 1993.

Starr had earlier served as solicitor general of the United States under President Bush from 1989 to 1993, and had been considered for a Supreme Court post. He had also been a U.S. Court of Appeals judge for six years.

Starr had taught at Pepperdine as a visiting professor and, early in his career, worked at the Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

“Any one of those jobs would be a wonderful capstone to one’s career,” said longtime friend Alex Kozinski, a judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena. “For someone to take a dean’s job with all of those credentials is a feather in the cap for any law school.”

Despite being known to the public as the counsel who doggedly pursued the Clintons, Kozinski said, Starr’s strength as the law school’s dean will be that “he is a great people person. He’s just great with colleagues. He’ll be great with alumni and in solving faculty problems. He’s a peacemaker, and just a great guy.”

Kozinski served with Starr as a Supreme Court law clerk to Chief Justice Warren Burger nearly 30 years ago.

Kozinski said Starr, the son of a Baptist minister, sold Bibles to help pay for college, but “he doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve. You have to get way past the surface to see the importance of religion to his life.”

Pepperdine is an independent Christian university that describes itself as committed to “the highest standards of academic excellence and Christian values.”

Starr earned his law degree at Duke University and holds a master’s from Brown University and a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University.