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Respected Judge Posts Sex Images Online

By Eugene Lee

As you may know, California falls within the jurisdiction of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the chief judge of that court is one Alex Kozinski. A brilliant jurist, he was first appointed to the Court by Reagan at the tender age of 35, making him the youngest federal appeals court judge in the nation. He has even been considered for appointment to the highest court in the land - the U.S. Supreme Court. Though often controversial, his court rulings have been notable for their clear, cutting analysis and common-sense explanation of difficult issues.

Now Judge Kozinski is in the middle of a new controversy that is sweeping the internet and media, and shaping up to be perhaps his most personally humiliating yet. According to the Los Angeles Times , he accidentally made his private collection of sex images and videos available online for the world to see. They were hosted on a subdirectory of his website, http://alex.kozinski.com. The images and videos include a semi-naked man cavorting around an aroused farm animal, women down on all fours painted to look like cows, a boy conducting fellatio on himself, etc.

Kozinski’s site has since been taken down and is no longer accessible by the public — but not before some enterprising soul managed to save and catalogue some of the embarrassing images and videos. Celebrity Justice has them up at their website. Warning: only those who are 18 years old or older should view the images due to explicit and disturbing sexual content.

Judge Kozinski has acknowledged that some of the material was inappropriate although, true to form, he has defended other material as "funny" and commented much of it had been forwarded to him by friends.

"Is it prurient? I don’t know what to tell you," he told the Los Angeles Times . "I think it’s odd and interesting. It’s part of life." He also said, "People send me stuff like this all the time".

This is not the first time Judge Kozinski has been known to raise a few eyebrows with his colorful personality. For one thing, he must be the only federal appellate judge who has appeared as a contestant on the Dating Game . . . and won. He beat out Squiggy from the T.V. show Laverne & Shirley . In one decision, Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc. , Kozinski concluded his opinion by stating "The parties are advised to chill." In U.S. v Syufy Enterprises , in which the defendant was a movie theater operator, Kozinski managed to sneak over 200 movie titles into his opinion.

Kozinski has suspended the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker he is currently presiding over for 48 hours so that the prosecutor can determine whether the revelations over Kozinski’s sex images present a conflict of interest requiring a new judge.

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Full post as published by California Labor and Employment Law on June 12, 2008 (boomark / email).