Personal and Professional Integrity in the Legal Profession: Lessons from President Clinton and Kenneth Starr

I. Introduction Throughout 1997 and early 1998, public debate about the legal system centered on two competing and troubling figures: President Bill Clinton and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. With months of impeachment hearings, year-long denials, and Barbara Walters's interviews, the country had an overconsuming dose of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Today, the American public has had enough of the denials, news commentary, and legal analysis of the case. Yet for the broader legal community, there is one issue that we have failed to examine closely: the personal and professional ethical lessons we should learn from the Clinton/Starr dilemma. This essay explores the ethical dynamics surrounding our Commander-in-Chief and his chief adversary and the extent to which their activities can produce valuable lessons for the profession. Even before this ethical quagmire took center stage, the general diagnosis of the state of legal ethics was dire.1 Everyday Americans questioned the professionalism, trust, and honesty of lawyers, while legal critics noted the increased mistrust and suspicion among attorneys themselves.2 What has created this bleak impression of lawyers involves the same elements that have permeated the behavior of President Clinton and Kenneth Starr: a decline in civil and courteous conduct, frequent lapses of appropriate ethical and professional behavior, and an increasingly aggressive and competitive drive to "win at all costs."3 Although it is certainly the case that lawyers have never enjoyed lofty reverence,4 lawyers previously had a greater claim to integrity and virtue.5 Indeed, the Civil Rights Movement and its progeny inspired many citizens "to view law as a shining sword with which to vanquish the longfestering problems of exclusion, poverty, and oppression," and Americans saw lawyers as "valiant and dedicated warriors for justice."6 poignantly, though perhaps ironically, it was the Watergate scandal that resulted in the end of the high regard of the law and the beginning of the continuing decline of the lawyer-statesman and lawyer-social engineer.7 During the Past two decades, public opinion of lawyers has been plummeting even more;8 after the Lewinsky affair, public opinion of lawyers may have reached an all time low. II.A Tale of Two Men One of the tragic realities about the Lewinsky affair and the independent counsel investigation is that prior to these events both Bill Clinton and Ken Starr would have enjoyed lasting legacies as virtuous public servants. In an October 1996 televised presidential debate with Bob Dole, for example, President Clinton correctly declared that: [C]ompared to four years ago, [the country is] clearly better off. We've got 10.5 million more jobs. The deficit's been reduced by sixty percent. Incomes are rising for the first time in a decade. The crime rates, the welfare rolls are falling. We're putting 100,000 more police on the street. Sixty thousand felons, fugitives and stalkers have been denied handguns. But that progress is only the beginning. What we really should focus on tonight is what we still have to do to help the American people make the most of this future that's out there. I think what really matters is what we can do to help build strong families. Strong families need a strong economy. To me that means we have to go on and balance this budget while we protect Medicare and Medicaid and education and the environment.9 After a first term that many will remember as one of the most progressive and economically beneficial of any presidency, Clinton continued to set out a bold plan for delivering what many up until his presidency had thought impossible: a balanced budget and strengthened Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.10 As he cruised through re-election,11 President Clinton's leadership moved society closer to the reverence we once had for the lawyer as social innovator of the 1960s. He gave many Americans a hope that the dreams of a more civil, peaceful, and prosperous society were not simple, obscure, unrealistic -yearnings- but rather attainable desires. …