Spotlight on the Ninth Circuit’s Alex Kozinski: “
A ‘California eccentrics’ theme has emerged from our morning items. We just posted on Seymour Lazar, an 80-year-old lawyer who pleaded guilty to crimes related to the Milberg Weiss case. On the opposite end of the Golden State-bar respectability spectrum, but no less colorful: Judge Alex Kozinski, who’s set to take over as the chief of the Ninth Circuit on Dec. 1. Here’s a profile in today’s National Law Journal.
For those non-Article III groupies out there, Kozinski is a big-time judge, appointed to the Ninth Circuit by President Reagan in 1985 at the age of 35. He was born in Romania to Holocaust survivors who brought him to Los Angeles, Calif. at the age of 12. Kozinski (UCLA, UCLA Law) had two decent clerkships (for then-Ninth Circuit Judge Anthony Kennedy and then Chief Justice Warren Burger), worked as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, and then became chief judge of the Federal Claims Court until his appointment to the Ninth Circuit.
Most importantly, he was voted the number-one male hottie in the federal judiciary by David Lat?s Underneath Their Robes blog (click here for Lat?s post; click here for Kozinski?s letter nominating himself).
He tells the NLJ his latest project: ‘I’m buying old copies of Playboy magazine on eBay, because everything I learned about writing I learned from Playboy fiction.’ He also admires the writing of sci-fi author Richard Matheson, and says he has been sharing it with his law clerks for its tight, declarative sentence structure that moves action quickly.
And if you want to clerk for a Supreme Court justice, you might consider trying to spend a year with Kozinski. According to the story, 42 of his clerks have moved on to clerk on the high court. Three of them are jurists themselves: the D.C. Circuit’s Brett Kavanaugh, the Ninth Circuit’s Sandra Ikuta and tax-court judge Mark Holmes.
“
(Via WSJ.com: Law Blog – WSJ.com.)