Kozinski In Context

Following up on my recent post on Judge Kozinski, I wanted to pass along more information from Eugene Volokh (who clerked for Judge Kozinski) that puts the situation into much better context than the original LA Times article I quoted from earlier:

A lawyer (Cyrus Sanai) who has long had a grudge against Judge Kozinski finds out that the Kozinski family has a network server with various files on it. The controversial files on that server aren't linked to from the Web, and aren't indexed on search engines. They are generally meant only for family members and a few other people who get specific pointers to them.

But the lawyer figures out the private server's internal directory structure, rummages around, finds some of the files, and downloads them. And some of the files contain what is basically... visual sexual humor.

Now the fruit of this disgruntled lawyer's rummaging through someone else's personal files somehow becomes a national news story. Why? Because Kozinski is presiding over an obscenity trial? All this stuff — the sort of sexual humor that gets circulated all the time — is not remotely in the same league as what the defendant is being criminally prosecuted for.

Kozinski has a quirky sense of humor, and keeps some joke pictures and videos on his computer rather than throwing them away. I'm sure they aren't the kinds of things some people would enjoy seeing. But he wasn't trying to show them to those people! He was just minding his own business, keeping some files on his own private server. And now it's a national news story.

Enough already. As Larry Lessig puts it, no-one should be put in the position of "hav[ing] to defend publicly private choices and taste" in a situation like this. We should all leave Kozinski to his own privately expressed sense of humor, as we'd like the world to leave us to ours.