As David Cohen noted below. Details here. He is not ethically competent to hear obscenity cases, I don’t think. He is trying to get his son to take the rap, apparently, and shift responsibility. I don’t buy it and I think trying to pin this on his son to save his own sorry pornified, misogynist self is truly pathetic.
–Ann Bartow
Updated to add: Kozinski also claims to have uploaded some of the images by mistake. And above by saving himself, I just meant his reputation, to the extent people are not already aware of his misogyny. I have little doubt he’ll keep his job for life. I did particularly enjoy this line from the NYT: “The judge, a married father of three sons, claims to build his own computers but told the Los Angeles Times he didn’t know the Web site was accessible to Internet surfers.”
After publication of an latimes.com article about his website Wednesday morning, the judge offered another explanation for how the material might have been posted to the site. Tuesday evening he had told The Times that he had a clear recollection of some of the most objectionable material and that he was responsible for placing it on the Web. By Wednesday afternoon, as controversy about the website spread, Kozinski was seeking to shift responsibility, at least in part, to his adult son, Yale.
“Yale called and said he’s pretty sure he uploaded a bunch of it,” Kozinski wrote in an e-mail to abovethelaw.com, a legal news website. “I had no idea, but that sounds right because I sure don’t remember putting some of that stuff there.”
UPDATE 2: WIRED.COM HAS SIGNIFICANT BACKGROUND INFORMATION.
Below is a short excerpt:
The images and MP3 files were discovered on Kozinski’s site last December by a Beverly Hills lawyer named Cyrus Mark Sanai, who has a bit of a contentious history with Kozinski. That history has its roots in a dispute that Sanai and his siblings have over the way the courts handled their parents’ divorce in 2002 after 41 years of marriage. Sanai, his siblings and their mother, who lives in Washington state, filed suit against the state of Washington and the state Supreme Court, among others, over the way the court handled the divorce and matters related to it.
They eventually filed a petition for an en banc re-hearing from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals where Kozinski is now chief judge.
While a decision on the petition was pending, Sanai says Kozinski wrote an article for The Recorder, a legal publication, that mentioned his petition and made statements that Sanai said were prejudicial against his petition and could influence his fellow appellate judges in the matter. In the article, Kozinski linked to a .pdf article that was relevant to the Sanai matter, which he hosted on his personal website.
Sanai filed a complaint against Kozinski alleging misconduct, and the 9th Circuit’s Judicial Council launched a limited inquiry.
Kozinski denied that his comments in the article addressed the merits of Sanai’s petition but acknowledged that some people could read his comments this way, and apologized to the Council, saying he would be more careful in the future. In December 2006, the Council ruled that no harm had been committed against Sanai or his case and therefore the allegations did not meet the standard for a finding of misconduct. The Council noted in its ruling (.pdf) that it found no indication that Kozinski had posted a court document related to Sanai’s petition on his website.
Sanai told Threat Level, however, that during the investigation he had personally walked an investigator through Kozinski’s site to show him the document. But after the Council’s ruling was released, he went to Kozinski’s site and found that it was gone. Using the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, Sanai found that the site had been taken down months earlier. Months after the Judicial Council’s ruling was released, Kozinski’s site came back up, without the controversial document posted on it, though an index of the site accessed through the Wayback Machine showed traces of the document that had been posted there.
(This week after the Los Angeles Times broke the story about explicit images on Kozinski’s site, the site once again was taken down.)
Interesting dialog @ the lessig blog – “The Kozinski Mess” — http://lessig.org/blog/2008/06/the_kozinski_mess.html
Kozinski is a powerful person with many powerful friends, and it is obvious that a huge PR campaign has been ramped up on his behalf. “Brianbison” has never commented here before, but found the post here and links to an impassioned defense of Kozinski by Larry Lessig. Lessig purports to have seen the web content at issue, I have not. Feel free to read his post and make up your own mind about the issue.
Lessig’s defense of Kozinski is not entirely honest (if the reporting in the papers is true). The only item that he describes is the “bestiality” video, which if its content is as described by Lessig, is, I agree, not what I understand bestiality to commonly refer to. But, the rest he compares to having a Playboy in the house. And that’s where I think he’s misdirecting.
Now, maybe I’m wrong – I haven’t looked at a Playboy since I was a teenager. So, I don’t know what’s in there these days. But, it reads to me that Lessig’s breezy reference to Playboy conjures up innocent naked pictures. (Note, he didn’t say Hustler.) And that’s not what the newspapers have described for Kozinski’s site. Instead, they’ve described several blatantly misogynistic images/videos that do more than give the reader the impression that the judge is interested in seeing erotic nudity; rather, it gives the impression that the judge is interested in seeing women degraded.
And that’s the problem here. It’s not that a judge who decides the fate of female litigants and interacts with female attorneys and judges likes the naked body; it’s that a judge who decides the fate of female litigants and interacts with female attorneys and judges likes seeing women degraded and demeaned.
Pingback: Feminist Law Professors » Blog Archive » Looks Like It Was Never About The Porn: Kozinski Accused By Lawyer Of Lying To Court
Pingback: The 16th Carnival of the Radical Feminists « Gorgon Poisons
Pingback: Sixteenth Carnival of Radical Feminists « Carnival of Radical Feminists