Legal News

Lawrence Lessig and Kozinski?s Wife Come to His Defense

By Dan Slater

No news today concerning Judge Kozinski. But there are two commentaries on the Web to highlight. The first is a post written last week by Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig, who for long has focused on law and technology, on his blog. The second is a letter from Marcy Tiffany, Judge Kozinski’s wife, pubbed today on Patterico’s Pontifications. (Click here for law blog background.)

Parsing “the Kozinski mess”: Lessig says the real Kozinski mess is “the total inability of the media — including we, the media, bloggers — to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective.” Lessig writes: “The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel - and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage.”

The site, he says, “was not ‘on the web’ in the sense of a site open and inviting anyone to come in. It had a robots.txt file to indicate its contents were not to be indexed. That someone got in is testimony to the fact that security — everywhere — is imperfect. But this was a private file server, like a private room ….”

He concludes: “There is nothing for Chief Judge Kozinski to defend because he has violated no law, and we live in a free society (or so he thought when he immigrated from Romania). A free society should feed the right to be left alone, including the right not to have to defend publicly private choices and taste, by learning not to feed the privacy trolls.”

Hearing from the Mrs.: This letter, by Marcy Tiffany — Judge Kozinski’s wife of 30+ years — defends the content on her family’s server, says the contents were mischaracterized (”The fact is, Alex is not into porn - he is into funny – and sometimes funny has a sexual character.”) and criticizes not only the L.A. Times but other media who have repeated the story.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 16, 2008 (boomark / email).