LORD, LAW COMBINE AT PEPPERDINE.

Byline: William Glaberson The New York Times

A towering cross dominates the sweeping hillside of the Pepperdine University campus, perched in the Santa Monica Mountains with a view of the glittering Pacific.

The cross is a symbol of the university's commitment to Christian values, and nowhere is that more evident than at the Pepperdine School of Law, an institution that is proudly at the edge of mainstream legal thinking.

Pepperdine's public courtship of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to be dean of its law school has brought unprecedented attention to the school, which is one of a handful of law schools that say their mission is to incorporate the values of Jesus Christ into the law and are working to influence legal thought nationally.

But a visit to the law school, while Starr's congressional testimony is making news in Washington, offers a look at the conservative Christian legal community that can claim both Starr and Pepperdine. Students and professors described a Christian approach to the law that some of them said was designed to combat the amorality of the American legal system. With lawyers perceived widely as dishonest opportunists and with public opinion polls traditionally ranking the legal profession near the bottom in integrity, they said, a more spiritual approach to legal education seemed justified.

``We're not just here to learn to be attorneys, but to learn to be virtuous attorneys both in our performance and in our hearts,'' said third-year student LeAllen Frost of Duncan, Okla.

Often in conversations at the university, Starr was cited as an example of a moral lawyer, while President Clinton's legalistic distinctions were used as examples of strategies that Christian lawyers should reject. ``At Pepperdine,'' said Jennifer Vanse, a second-year student, ``they teach you, Don't try and get off on your little technicalities.''

Liberals and conservatives both criticized Starr's plan in 1997 to resign as the independent counsel to take up an academic life at Pepperdine. After at first delaying his arrival, Starr said last spring that he would not come at all.

At the law school, the only one in the country affiliated with the Churches of Christ denomination, professors cover all the usual law school material and then add another dimension. The Churches of Christ is a theologically conservative denomination that historically has discouraged drinking, smoking and dancing.

A lawyer's morality, said Douglas Kmiec, a Pepperdine professor, can be as important to clients as a solid knowledge of the statutes and court decisions. ``If you're going to hold yourself out as a counselor giving people advice,'' he said, ``you can't give incomplete advice.''

So, in one of his classes, students read papal encyclicals in addition to court opinions. Some professors hold Bible study groups. Some urge their students to ask combatants in litigation to read Scripture as a path toward the resolution of lawsuits.

In one class, students said, a professor who opposes abortion rights presented all the material including cases dealing with abortion and then told his students: ``OK, now you know the law; now we're going to discuss the law. What do you think of it as a Christian?''

There are 37 religiously affiliated law schools in the United States, although most do not emphasize those ties. Law schools at many of the country's large, religiously affiliated universities, including some at the major Roman Catholic universities, teach law much as secular schools do. Legal educators say only about a dozen of the 180 law schools in the country emphasize their religious values in their courses. Pepperdine administrators say their school is among the ones that are most committed to the religious mission.

Pepperdine's approach differs from that of most American law schools, where moral or religious convictions are often avoided in the classroom. Traditional law schools focus their attention less on questions of right and wrong than on a more objective mastery of what the law is.

The difference between Pepperdine and most law schools is intentional, said Richardson Lynn, a soft-spoken law professor with a graying beard and a bias for bow ties who was named dean when Starr declined the post.

Lynn, who like Starr was raised attending the Church of Christ, said the school focuses on taking a Christian view of the law. Asked for an example, he said that would include training students to challenge clients involved in immoral businesses like Internet pornography. Law students, he said, are not asked to reject clients of whom they disapprove and are taught to represent their clients as zealously as any other lawyer. But they are also taught ``to think about what they can do to raise with clients the moral dimensions of what their business is.''

Many law schools across the country in recent years have tried to increase their focus on lawyers' ethics. But their approach, legal educators say, has emphasized the secular rules of the profession, like the concept that every person is entitled to a defense no matter how reprehensible the act he is accused of committing.

Some legal educators say Pepperdine's focus flies in the face of the pragmatic approach to the legal profession that, for good or ill, has shaped many law schools.

``Students are very bread-and-butter-oriented,'' said Barry Furrow, interim dean of the Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Del. Few young lawyers, he added, would be comfortable delving into the morality of their clients. ``Their first concern,'' he said, ``is not to alienate a client.''

Lynn said the sense of morality extended to the administration of the school, which has 650 students who take standard bar examinations and work in traditional legal jobs, like clerkships with judges and positions in law firms all over the country. Pepperdine, which like many regional law schools is typically ranked well below the elite schools, seeks to produce students who can compete with graduates of other law schools for jobs. But several students said in interviews that smaller firms in small cities seemed most receptive to them.

Students agreed that the fierce competition that characterizes many law schools is not the norm at Pepperdine.

Some students said, too, that Pepperdine encourages a constant examination not only of what the law is but whether it is moral. Eric Nelson, a student from Menomonee Falls, Wis., said he has been taught that ``just because the law says what it says doesn't mean you should stop there.''

Some students also expressed irritation at what they called the cliched portrayals of Starr, Christian lawyers in general and Pepperdine in particular. After Starr announced his decision to become dean and to head a new public policy school, some of his critics called Pepperdine a haven for right-wing activists.

Richard Mellon Scaife, a wealthy conservative who has contributed to many conservative causes, has given some $13 million to the 7,800-student university over the years. Scaife has not given money to the law school, but Pepperdine said a foundation associated with him gave $1.2 million of some $20 million in start-up costs for the public policy school.

Many of the students and professors acknowledged that their own politics are conservative. But some of them complained that stereotypes have shaped the public view of Christian lawyers and of Starr, who has said he likes to start the day singing a hymn and offering a prayer.

``There just seems to be this view that if you are a Christian, you think everybody else that's not just like you is wrong,'' said Chad Brown, a 25-year-old law student who grew up in Texas. ``That's just not it. That's not how the original man we named our religion after - Jesus Christ - was. He wasn't judgmental.''

But at the school, the line between moral and political positions sometimes seems to blur. In his constitutional law class, Kmiec questioned students about a series of cases just as professors do at secular law schools.

But then he led the discussion toward what he called ``natural law,'' which he and several of the students agreed was a force more powerful than the precedents of courts. Many conservatives say the natural law of God requires that abortion or assisted suicide should be outlawed no matter what the courts have ruled.

The routine at Pepperdine sometimes seems much like that of other law schools, and the students look like students everywhere. But occasionally the differences were evident.

Some of the Pepperdine faculty members seemed anxious to show how different from traditional law schools Pepperdine is. William P. Haney Jr., who has been teaching law at Pepperdine for 22 years, was one who pointed out distinctions.

Haney, a professor of juvenile justice issues, described himself as a community service activist and said he is very conservative. Every year he trains some 200 law students to work with him to help prisoners and disadvantaged inner-city residents through programs he runs that he said stress character, strong values and Christian redemption.

The philosophy he teaches law students, he said, is that there are good and bad people. ``One of our functions as lawyers,'' he added, ``is to make sure that the good people win.''

Then, from a room across the hall from his law school office, Haney summoned a 15-year-old boy. Haney said the youth is a former gang member who had been imprisoned for robbery and whose mother is a drug addict. The teen-ager shook hands politely.

Haney said the youth is one of 20 who have lived with him and his wife. The teen, he said, is working with him on ``preparing to be a good person.'' Under his supervision, Haney said, the youth does several hours of homework every day and, when he goes to school, is not permitted to accept school lunch money because of Haney's objections to government intervention.

``In some law schools,'' Haney added, ``I would be considered out of step.''

CAMPUS QUOTES

``We're not just here to learn to be attorneys, but to learn to be virtuous attorneys both in our performance and in our hearts.''

- LeAllen Frost

Third-year student

``At Pepperdine they teach you, Don't try and get off on your little technicalities.''

- Jennifer Vanse

Second-year student

``If you're going to hold yourself out as a counselor giving people advice, you can't give incomplete advice.''

- Douglas Kmiec

Professor

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos, Box

PHOTO (1) A stand of trees on the Pepperdine University campus in Malibu provides a picturesque relaxation spot for some students on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Michael Owen Baker/Daily News

(2--3) Stauffer Chapel, above, and Phillips Theme Tower, in background at left, loom over the university's lower campus area. Pepperdine's School of Law, right, combines an education in the American legal system with a liberal dose of religious values.

Daily News

(4) An amphitheater is part of the architecture of Stauffer Chapel.

Daily News

BOX: CAMPUS QUOTES (see text)