Alex Kozinski

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Image:Kozinski.jpgJudge Alex Kozinski (born July 23, 1950) is a judge in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and a popular essayist.

Kozinski was born in Bucharest, Romania but his parents, both Holocaust survivors, brought him to United States in 1962 when he was 12. They settled in Los Feliz, Los Angeles and his father, Moses, ran a small grocery store there.

Kozinski attended John Marshall High School and then the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his J.D. from UCLA School of Law in 1975; he went on to clerk for then-Ninth Circuit Judge Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice Warren Burger. Then he spent a few years in private practice before going to work in the White House counsel's office under President Ronald Reagan.

Kozinski's first judicial appointment was as chief judge at the newly-formed Court of Federal Claims. In 1985, age 35, Kozinki was appointed to the Ninth Circuit by Reagan, making him the youngest federal appeals court judge in the country. One of his highest profile cases to date was the lawsuit filed by Mattel against the Danish pop-dance group Aqua for "turning Barbie into a sex object" in their Barbie Girl song, a case which he dismissed, famously concluding his opinion with the words "[t]he parties are advised to chill." Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc., 296 F.3d 894, 908 (9th Cir. 2002).

Kozinski has won admirers across the political spectrum with his common-sense decisions and libertarian instinct. As an essayist, his writing is clear and often humorous, and has been featured in mainstream publications such as Slate, The New Yorker, The New Republic and The National Review. He also has a reputation as an active and sometimes intimidating questioner during oral argument. Because English is not his native language, he speaks with a strong accent which is often surprising to lawyers who are familiar only with his distinctive writing style.

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Trivia

When he was much younger, Kozinski appeared on The Dating Game and won. [1]
In 2004, Judge Kozinski was elected the Number 1 Male Superhottie of the federal judiciary by a vote held by the weblog "Underneath Their Robes".
Fresh out of law school, Kozinski was given a traffic ticket which gave the wrong court date. Kozinski challenged the ticket in court (Kozinski v. Gates) before Judge William Byrne of the Central District of California, and won. Three decades later, Kozinski's son fell victim to a similarly absurd procedure, also took the County to court (Kozinski v. Baca & Chavez), and appeared before the same Judge, who ruled for the son in the same manner as he had for the father. As a consequence of these two actions, traffic tickets must give accurate and current dates for court appearances, and automatic bail is no longer required for traffic tickets in Los Angeles County. [2]

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