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If you think that what Judge Kozinski did was bad, I know of federal appellate judges who have publicly admitted to viewing child pornography

If you think that what Judge Kozinski did was bad, I know of federal appellate judges who have publicly admitted to viewing child pornography: Of course, those other judges did that in the context of adjudicating appeals in which a criminal defendant was challenging the sufficiency of the evidence supporting a child pornography conviction.

Here are some random thoughts in the aftermath of the news story that The Los Angeles Times broke yesterday.

• The attorney who drew the material on Judge Kozinski's web site to the media's attention first clashed with Judge Kozinski over whether non-precedential, unpublished opinions should be citeable. See here and here. Who knew that the spirited dispute over Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1 would lead to this?
• Sure he apologized, just not to you -- Judge Kozinski's essay replying to the attorney's essay led the attorney to initiate a judicial misconduct proceeding that was terminated by means of an order signed by the Ninth Circuit's then-chief judge saying, among other things, that Judge Kozinski had apologized for his actions. Toward the conclusion of this lengthy article published in April 2008 in The California Lawyer, the complainant says that Judge Kozinski in fact had not apologized to him. Even if that's true, Judge Kozinski still may have apologized -- to the Ninth Circuit's then-chief judge.
• How uninterested were The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and California's two leading legal newspapers in this story when it was first brought to their attention in January 2008 (see the source's explanation in my update to this post from very early this morning)? Despite Mark Obbie's views regarding the newsworthiness of this matter, those four publications -- which each apparently had been provided with a CD containing many of the images and other files copied from Judge Kozinski's web site -- took absolutely no action to contact Judge Kozinski to learn his side of the story. Had even one of those publications contacted him, you can be certain that the material in question would have been removed from the web long before Tuesday night of this week.

In what some may view as an ironic coincidence, Judge Kozinski is scheduled to appear this Saturday on a breakout panel titled "Rights in Conflict: Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Religious Liberty" at the American Constitution Society National Convention in Washington, D.C. (see page 4 of this PDF file). At precisely the same time, the ACS Convention will also feature another breakout panel titled "The End of Anonymity? Threats to Privacy in a Brave New World" featuring, among others, Law Professors Orin Kerr and Jeffrey Rosen.

Full post as published by How Appealing on June 13, 2008 (boomark / email).