It Just Makes Me Sooo Proud...

Yet another member of my tribe, from the subgroup that is supposed to show good judgment, no less, has careened off the rails and given the profession yet another facial contusion that it did not need. Seriously, I am not the sharpest tool in the legal shed. No one in their right mind is going to confuse me with Justice Scalia anytime soon, but I could show better judgment then this guy.


Report: Smut-case judge posted explicit images
He thought they weren't publicly accessible, L.A. Times says

updated 2 hours, 19 minutes ago
LOS ANGELES - A newspaper reported Wednesday that a judge presiding in the obscenity trial of a porn movie distributor posted sexually explicit images on his personal Web site.

The Los Angeles Times reports Judge Alex Kozinski blocked public access to the site after an interview Tuesday evening.

He couldn't have given it a minute's extra thought and said to himself, "No, maybe I shouldn't preside over this particular trial."? And blocking access undercuts the argument that you didn't think they were publically accessible, doesn't it?

The Times reported on its Web site Wednesday that the material posted on Kozinski's site included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a farm animal.

I don't know. Maybe the pictures moooovvveed him. Maybe he thought he was "getting back to nature". Still, the hamster on the wheel in the back of his head couldn't feel the slightest bit motivated to start running long enough to bring the lights up in the critical thinking part of his brain?

The Times says Kozinski acknowledged in the interview that he posted the items but thought it wasn't publicly accessible. The judge also told the newspaper he didn't believe the material was obscene.

Ok. Baloney to the first. The second...well, it was a US Supreme Court justice who summed it up best when he said of obscenity "I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it.", so in all fairness, he might get a pass on that. The problem is whether rightly, or wrongly, the cult of the robe is usually held to a higher standard. That means that even though they have the same rights as you and I, they don't necessarily get to do the same things. Given the fact that this is not a case about your garden variety smut, the judge's stunning mental lapse is even more grevious. He has now thoughtlessly provided a basis for the participants and the public to question the outcome, no matter what that might be.