Starr, Kenneth Winston,
1946–2022, American public official, b. Vernon, Tex., grad. George
Washington Univ. (B.A., 1968), Brown (M.A., 1969), Duke (J.D., 1973). After
clerking for Chief Justice Warren Burger and working in the Justice Dept.,
he served on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Later he was
solicitor general (1989–93) in the G. H. W. Bush administration, then
practiced law privately. In Aug., 1994, he was named Whitewater prosecutor, replacing Robert
Fiske. Starr's office gradually expanded the scope of its investigations of
President Clinton and his
administration, but without striking success until Jan., 1998, when his
inquiry was expanded to include the president's role in what became the
Lewinsky scandal.
Clinton's defenders criticized the conservative Starr as ideologically
motivated, and his report to the House of Representatives, setting out a
case for impeachment, was
attacked as prejudicially detailed. After the impeachment and acquittal of
the president, Starr seemed to agree that the law establishing the independent counsel should not be
renewed, although he strongly defended his actions. The law lapsed in June,
1999, and he resigned the Whitewater post in October. Dean of Pepperdine
Univ.'s law school from 2004, Starr was named president of Baylor Univ. and
a member of its law school faculty in 2010 and university chancellor in
2014, but he was removed as president and then resigned as chancellor and
professor in 2016 after an investigation determined the university had not
properly investigated sexual assault accusations against football players.
In 2020, he served as a member of President Trump's impeachment defense
team. Starr has written First among Equals (2002), a
conservative examination of the late-20th-century Supreme Court.
See his memoir of the Clinton investigation (2018); K. Gormley, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr (2010).
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