Kenneth Starr, born in 1946, American lawyer, federal judge, and independent counsel whose investigation of United States president Bill Clinton led to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998.

Starr was born in Vernon, Texas, the youngest of three children. His father served as a minister in the Church of Christ. After studying at Harding College (now Harding University) for two years, Starr completed his undergraduate education at George Washington University. He earned a master’s degree in political science from Brown University in 1969 and a law degree from Duke University Law School in 1973.

Starr worked as a law clerk to United States Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1975 to 1977. After an interval of private practice, in 1981 Starr joined the Department of Justice during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, serving as the top aide to Attorney General William French Smith. Among other duties, Starr helped draft the Reagan administration’s legal brief opposing the Independent Counsel Act. This act authorized special prosecutors to investigate alleged crimes by officials in the executive and legislative branches of government.

In 1983, at age 37, Starr was appointed as a judge to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He was the youngest person ever to receive this lifetime appointment. However, he gave up the position in 1989 when President George Bush asked him to serve as solicitor general. The solicitor general’s primary duty is to represent the government in cases before the Supreme Court. Following Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election, Starr returned to private law practice.

In 1994 Starr was appointed as an independent counsel to investigate Clinton, his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton, and others for alleged financial misdeeds in the so-called Whitewater affair. The Whitewater investigation centered on the Clintons’ 1978 investment in a failed real estate venture and the venture’s connection to the 1989 failure of an Arkansas savings and loan association. Although the Clintons were not charged, Starr obtained convictions of others connected with the case, including Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker, the Clintons’ former business partners James and Susan McDougal, and former associate attorney general Webster Hubbell.

Starr’s inquiry into the Whitewater affair expanded to several ancillary lines of investigation. The most significant of these investigations concerned a cover-up of a sexual affair between Clinton and a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. In 1998 Starr released a 445-page report to the U.S. House of Representatives that referred 11 possible grounds for Clinton’s impeachment. Starr’s report alleged that Clinton lied under oath when he denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. Based on the Starr report, the House impeached Clinton on two counts, perjury and obstruction of justice, but the Senate later acquitted Clinton on both counts. In 1999 Starr stepped down as independent counsel, returning again to private practice.

Starr’s five-year term as independent counsel was highly controversial. Critics attacked Starr’s probe as an expensive, politically motivated effort to entrap the president and accused Starr of failing to show restraint in investigating minor crimes. Others defended Starr’s investigation as a thorough, fair, and necessary pursuit of alleged crimes committed by the president. Many lawmakers acknowledged that Starr’s investigation exposed flaws in the Independent Counsel Act, which authorized an open-ended investigation wherever criminal behavior may have taken place. After Starr himself spoke out against the law, Congress let the act expire in June 1999.