9th Circuit's chief judge posted sexually explicit matter on his website
Alex Kozinski, who is presiding over an obscenity trial in L.A., acknowledges that he had posted sexually explicit photos and videos. He says he didn't think the public could access the site.
One of the highest-ranking federal judges in the United States, who is currently presiding over an obscenity trial in Los Angeles, has maintained a publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.
Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged in an interview with The Times that he had posted the materials, which included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Some of the material was inappropriate, he conceded, although he defended other sexually explicit content as "funny."
Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.
Obscenity trial: An article in Thursday's Section A about a website maintained by federal appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski paraphrased Corynne McSherry, staff attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying that just making music files available, even if no one downloaded them, might run afoul of the law. In fact, she said that although copyrights may be infringed without downloading, depending on the circumstances of the given case, simply making them available wouldn't violate the law.
Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, told The Times that Kozinski should recuse himself from the Isaacs case because "the public can reasonably question his objectivity" concerning the issues at hand.
Gillers, who has known Kozinski for years and called him "a treasure of the federal judiciary," said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was "seriously negligent" in allowing it to be discovered.
"The phrase 'sober as a judge' resonates with the American public," Gillers said. "We don't want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people."
Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would "harm his reputation in many quarters," but that the controversy should die there.
He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, "that's a transgression of another order."
"It would be very hard for him to come back from that," he said.
