Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and has known Kozinski for years, called him "a treasure of the federal judiciary." Gillers 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."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, June 17, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 78 words Type of Material: Correction
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.
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.
Kozinski has a reputation as a brilliant legal mind and is seen as a champion of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several years ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.
The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the trial of filmmaker Ira Isaacs in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appellate judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars, and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.
Isaacs is on trial for distributing sexual fetish videos, featuring acts of bestiality and defecation. The material is considerably more vulgar than the content posted on Kozinski's website.
The judge said he didn't think any of the material on his site would qualify as obscene.
"Is it prurient? I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."
Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre."
Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski's essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.
