One of Kenneth Starr’s lesser-noted but more interesting problems is the criticism he has drawn from his own profession.

The amicus briefs by the American Bar Association and three other national lawyers’ organizations in a pending Supreme Court case are but one example. They argue forcefully that Starr is flouting settled practice in his bid to compel evidence from the late Vincent Foster’s lawyer, James Hamilton, by claiming that Foster’s attorney-client privilege died with him in July 1993.

Prominent lawyers have also denounced Starr’s tactics on other issues with a passion that is surprising, given the praise he received when he was appointed independent counsel almost four years ago.

Meanwhile, adversaries such as President Clinton’s lead lawyer, David Kendall–another respected member of the legal establishment–trash Starr with a venom that seems to transcend the customary head-butting of opposing counsel.

What explains all this? Has Kenneth Starr, who was seen as a courtly conciliator when he was a judge, simply gone berserk? Has he been taken hostage by gonzo prosecutors on his staff?

Although Starr has surely been aggressive–perhaps too aggressive, in some instances–he has not become the wild man of the legal profession. Nor is he in the lawyers’ doghouse solely because of the partisan rancor that would accompany the criminal investigation of any President by an independent counsel who has been active in the opposing political party.

The real reason, I think, is that Starr has openly challenged some of the prevailing practices of the legal profession. Both in his public advocacy and in some of his legal arguments, Starr has set himself against what he characterizes as a subtle drift in our legal culture. He senses that lawyers are seeing the adversary system less and less as a process restrained by the basic goal of uncovering the truth, and more and more as a vehicle for unrestrained advocacy–complete with tactics of concealment, deception and distortion that stop just short of lying.

In a June 1 speech to a North Carolina lawyers group, Starr contrasted Atticus Finch, the hero of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird–who defended a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman in a segregated Southern town– with the often-negative portrayals of lawyers today as people who ”will do anything for a client.” While such portrayals may be unfair, Starr said:

”We must concede, our profession has changed. (Most) baleful to the profession (has been) its apparent loss of respect for the truth. . . . When a search for the truth is not in the client’s best interest, which value should guide the lawyer’s conduct? Lawyers have faced this problem for quite some time, but the balance we strike appears to have changed. . . . Lawyers’ modern-day image as ‘hired guns’ suggests that at least a good many lawyers have decided to pay less than scrupulous regard for the truth in the service of their clients.

”This choice is, I think, unfortunate. . . . Even as technicians, lawyers have a duty not to use their skills to impede the search for truth.”

Starr’s speech has been disputed by some thoughtful critics, and dismissed as naive or hypocritical by others who find it easier to shoot the messenger–whose work for tobacco companies makes him an inviting target–than to grapple with the message. The thoughtful critics include professor Stephen Gillers of New York University Law School, who refutes as far too simplistic Starr’s categorical claim that lawyers must not ”impede the search for truth.” Criminal-defense lawyers sometimes have an affirmative ethical duty to do just that, Gillers notes, by using whatever means the law allows to withhold incriminating evidence from the prosecution.

Gillers also doubts that there ever were any ”good old days” in which lawyers were more devoted to truth-seeking than now. But Starr is supported on this point by (among others) professor Akhil Amar of Yale Law School, who also senses that increasing competition for clients has helped drive lawyers to style themselves more and more as ”zealous advocates” and less and less as ”officers of the court.”

The more-facile criticisms of Starr’s speech include a June 3 op-ed article in The New York Times by David Kendall, accusing Starr of an ”attempt to make Atticus Finch into a docile figure who bows to the prosecutor’s will.” It was not Starr, however, but Kendall himself who equated truth-seeking with bowing to the prosecutor’s will.

Kendall also put ”truth” in quotation marks. This seemed redolent of the comfo rting rationalization voiced by some in the defense bar that ultimate truth is so elusive as to be unknowable, and is thus of little concern to a defense lawyer.

Kendall was of course correct in stressing that in an adversary system, the truth is supposed to emerge from a dialetic of advocacy by opposing lawyers. It’s also clear that pursuit of truth must sometimes give way to other values, including individual privacy and dignity; that’s one reason we don’t condone coerced confessions. And no serious critic would suggest that it is improper for private lawyers such as Kendall to claim whatever privileges may be available to withhold from prosecutors any evidence that may hurt their clients, including the President.

(Some do suggest that it is unpresidential for Clinton to authorize his lawyers to use every available strategem to hide damaging facts, as do ”mafiosi and subjects of so-called white- collar crime investigations,” in the words of a June 4 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal by Paul J. Curran, a former special prosecutor. He stressed that he got ”full cooperation” when he investigated and cleared President Carter in 1979.)

To suggest that the current rules and practices may be flawed would not justify changing them in the middle of the game so as to get Bill Clinton. But Starr is in good company in chafing at how far the logic of the adversary system has carried the profession down the road of hired-gun ethics.

”It is time to ask,” Floyd Abrams, a leading 1st Amendment lawyer, wrote in 1994, ”whether it really leads to justice to have a system in which many lawyers spend far more time avoiding truth than finding it.” And David Luban, in a powerful 1988 critique, Lawyers and Justice, wrote that the legal profession too complacently claims ”an institutionalized immunity from the requirements of conscience.” Adds Amar: ”What offends me is lawyers dressing all this stuff up in the high- minded rhetoric of professional responsibility, when what’s really at stake is often pursuit of the almighty buck.”

Starr’s general lament dovetails with his litigation posture in his argument that White House lawyers such as Bruce Lindsey–as distinguished from private lawyers such as Kendall– should be barred from using the attorney-client privilege to withhold evidence from Starr’s grand jury, because they owe their allegiance not to Bill Clinton but to the presidency, and to the nation.

One point of potential contention lurks in Starr’s emphasis in his speech on a 1986 case (Nix v. Whiteside) in which the late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger (for whom Starr had clerked) stressed that lawyers should never knowingly help clients or witnesses commit perjury.

Starr has not accused any lawyer of doing that. But the temptation to assist perjury is at its highest when lawyers for the head of an organization and lawyers for his or her subordinates form a common front against criminal investigators, exchanging information and keeping various witnesses posted on what other witnesses–including their bosses–are saying. Starr seems to be pressing to find out whether any joint-defense tactics at the White House may have been carried to the point of obstructing justice.

Starr will not have an easy time proving that any of the lawyers has crossed the line into criminality. He also may not (and perhaps should not) prevail in his current argument that he should have free rein to interrogate White House lawyers about their discussions with the President and others. And–judging by the tenor of the Supreme Court Justices’ comments and questions– Starr does not seem a great bet to win his argument that Vincent Foster’s attorney-client privilege died with him.

But whatever the outcome of this or that battle, the history of Starr’s investigation seems likely to bear out his larger lament. In a 1995 column (unrelated to Clinton’s troubles), I voiced a similar complaint, and I am complaining still, despite the absence of a ready cure for a problem that resides less in our legal rules than in our legal culture: There is something amiss, as I wrote then, with an adversary system in which so many of the most prosperous and prestigious practitioners ”bend, distort, conceal, cover up, obfuscate, or misrepresent the facts, in ways that are simultaneously 1) regarded by ordinary people as just plain dishonest, and 2) defended by many lawyers and legal experts as embodying the finest traditions of the bar.”