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Second thoughts on Kozinski

By Mark Obbie

Patterico's Pontifications runs a letter from Alex Kozinski's wife, lawyer Marcy Tiffany, that puts the LA Times' revelations in a very different light. I still think that it's fair to question Kozinski's judgment, and his ethics in hearing an obscenity case (and I wonder when critics will ever stop accusing journalists of merely trying to "sell newspapers," considering that hardly anyone buys newspapers any more). When you're the chief judge of a U.S. circuit court, being "into funny" on a publicly accessible computer -- call it a Web site, call it a server, it was not strictly private -- makes your humor a political and legal issue when it's as risque as Kozinski's files were. But Tiffany makes a convincing case that Scott Glover's descriptions of Kozinski's material and behavior lacked a complete and fair context. As a reader, I would have appreciated more description of the specifics (assuming Tiffany's description is fair and complete). Did Glover spin the story negatively? Did Kozinski fail to explain adequately his material when confronted? I can't tell. But I now think that I was too glib to refer to the material as Kozinski's "porn stash" and to assume that the Times' competitors erred by passing on the story. Perhaps they saw that complete context and deemed it less relevant to Kozinski's public life than others might. Or maybe they were just creeped out by the tipster's motives.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on June 16, 2008 (boomark / email).