Well call out the “hysteria patrol.” It seems that Ninth Circuit judge Alex Kozinski not only had adult images on his computer, but he also forwarded email jokes to his friends. (source)
One e-mail contained a list of items under the heading “You may be a Taliban if ….” Among the items was “You wipe your butt with your bare left hand, but consider bacon ‘unclean.’ ” (source)
National Journal columnist Stuart Taylor Jr. told the Times he was on the gag list for more than a decade.
“He’s not hung up on the need to be dignified,” Taylor said. “He enjoys life the way he did before he was a judge, and that may not comport with some peoples’ image of what judges should be like.” (source)
News flash, judges are human beings too… and frankly, I prefer it that way.
What I find shocking about this is not that Kozinski is just a regular guy with a sense of humor, but that a guy who is as smart and intellectually curious as Kozinski was so damned behind on his internet meme humor. I get those same emails sent to me, mostly by my elderly relatives who are just discovering teh internets. Doesn’t Kozinski hire clerks?
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The Legal Satyricon 
[…] I find the second joke far more offensive, and not just because it lacks a punchline. I find it offensive that Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Judge Alex Kozinski, who was embroiled in controversy earlier this year over his maintenance of rather silly (but offensive to Mrs. Grundy) images on a web server he thought was private, is yet again the subject of an apparent jihad by his hometown paper, for having a sense of humor. […]
I’ll second that: Seems someone at the Times has a hard-on for the good judge. I attended the Ira Isaacs trial (as much of it as there was, anyway) that (in a sense) gave rise to this controversy, and Kozinski was an incredibly good jurist, even going out of his way to excuse potential jurors who even *thought* they *might* be offended by the material at issue. (Actually, the prosecution objected to that, since it appeared to me that they *wanted* some people who might be offended on the jury …) I don’t know what the Times has against him, but the character assassination he’s currently undergoing shouldn’t even happen to a pornographer.
[…] Judge Kozinski (who is probably better known for more recent events) sets the tone for his now-famous opinion in the first line: “If this were a sci-fi […]
I know this is off topic, and probably a bit… naive? But is this the judge that was referenced in the Law & Order SVU where the judge had “funny/questionable” images on his private server? Either way, this guy is amazing.