The Malibu Times reports that Ken Starr has been appointed Dean of Pepperdine Law School.
Apparently law students at Pepperdine will learn from the top that it is all right to investigate consensual sex when no one complains, tape friends’ conversations without permission, force legal-age young people to testify about their friends’ consenting sexual lives, make mothers testify against their daughters when no crime is committed, force Secret Service not to be secret, subpoena records of books bought at bookstores about legal subjects, secretly subpoena home phone records of innocent witnesses and force them to testify in front of grand juries about private conversations with friends, write pornographic reports you know will be used fully in the press, and claim you are doing all this for the good of the nation despite virtually all precedents protecting privacy and First Amendment rights.
They will also learn to build perjury cases by using stings and coercive techniques to generate defensive statements by someone protecting the privacy of a personal physical relationship where no one expressed harm.
Let’s hope they don’t use these lessons either as special prosecutors or even in traditional legal procedures.
And let’s hope they don’t decide to spend $60 million of federal funds over six years in proving someone has a private consenting relationship with no complaining party.
As one of the more than 100 Clinton staff and friends whom Ken Starr interrupted our lives by insisting we testify in front of his grand jury investigating the president’s consensual relationship, I can personally testify that his distorted view of the law is not one which should ever be disseminated to students as a model of what is right.
Robert S. Weiner