Judge Kenneth Starr spends the day with Lipscomb community
Janel Shoun |
Judge Kenneth Starr, dean and professor of law at Pepperdine University School of Law and a key investigator in the presidential scandals of the late 1990s, began and ended his day with the Lipscomb community on Friday, Jan. 26.
Starr greeted the day along with 450 Nashville businesspeople who gathered to hear his speech, “Doing Business in America: Life Lessons from the Beltway.”
“I’m going to suggest that companies should start engaging in constitutional literacy,” he told the participants in Lipscomb’s Business Leadership Speaker Series, an annual lecture series for local professionals.
Starr, dean and professor of law at Pepperdine University School of Law, said that one of the business world’s main challenges is how to “capture the culture of integrity in a post-Enron world?”
America’s businesses should hold themselves to higher, more selfless standards, he said.
He held up Chik-Fil-A and Johnson and Johnson as two companies to model. Chik-Fil-A’s mission objectives include, “to glorify God by being a faithful steward,” and Johnson and Johnson’s creed is, “We care about the people who use our products.”
After the Business Leadership Speaker Series breakfast, Starr signed copies of his book, First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life, and walked over to the new Ezell Center, where he spoke with an invited group of Nashville leaders on the topic of immigration. The discussion was hosted by Lipscomb’s Institute for Conflict Management, established this summer to promote mediation and dispute resolution in the area.
Finally, Starr ended his day by participating in a panel discussion on the death penalty, sponsored by the Institute for Conflict Management and the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University.
With John Seignethaler as host, Starr, Brad MacLean of the Tennessee Justice Project , U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Gil Merritt, and Gene Policinski, vice president of the First Amendment Center, spoke to an audience of Lipscomb and Vanderbilt students, local retirees and young aspiring journalists.
Starr, who has worked on several high-profile cases opposing the death penalty, said that when “you look into the eye of someone who has been exonerated, and know they are completely innocent… that’s when you think, Oh my! How can we be more sorrowful? How can we do more?”
Starr said he believes juries are more often taking advantage of the life-without-parole sentences to avoid sending a defendant to death row. He also noted that the American press does not normally capture the entire complexity of most death penalty cases.
Starr became a household name during his tenure as Independent Counsel from 1994-1999, when he investigated the role of President Bill Clinton in the Whitewater, Travelgate and Monica Lewinsky scandals. Previously, as Solicitor General of the United States, Starr argued 25 cases in front of the Supreme Court.