Kozinski and the big tent

Most attorneys (or observers of the judiciary) know of embattled Federal Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski (the "porn" hosting judge), but I knew of him primarily because he is a notorious or regular speaker at Federalist Society events. Don't ever tell me we Conservatives don't have a big tent.

Here's an intriguing profile of Kozinski from several years ago. From the article:

There's also nothing conservative about Kozinski in the stuffed-shirt sense; he's a troublemaker. The judge is zany and bawdy, a high-pitched giggler and an anything-goes storyteller. Kozinski takes his law clerks paintballing and snowboarding. (E-mails from his personal account are addressed from 'The Easy Rider,' a reference to his snow boarder identity.) He has written video game reviews for The Wall Street Journal and an account of a Malibu pajama and lingerie party for the online magazine Slate. Six pet chickens have the run of his property in the beachfront community of Palos Verdes, where he lives with his wife and three sons. When Kozinski gives surplus eggs as gifts, he names which chicken (Veronica or Heckle) laid each one. At one oral argument in September, after listening to the Drug Enforcement Agency argue for a ban on the use of hemp seed and oil in food products, Kozinski leaned forward solicitously. 'Before you sit down, can you tell me how you're going to save the poppyseed bagel?' he asked the government's lawyer, to the delight of the Vote Hemp deadheads in the audience.

Kozinski's open-to-anything mindset means that as a judge he relishes the opportunity to shred a piece of received wisdom. That doesn't mean he's a judicial activist in the ends-justify-means sense. Though he often makes mincemeat of poor reasoning in a previous judicial holding, Kozinski doesn't ignore or brush off precedential rulings that don't go his way; he insists on letting the language of a statute set the course of his analysis. 'If you, as a judge, find yourself too happy with the result in a case, stop and think,' he has written. 'Is that result justified by the law, fairly and honestly applied to the facts? Or is it merely a bit of self-indulgence?'

From what I know of Kozinski, these recent disclosures are not out of character; nonetheless, they highlight a part of his character that was better--for his sake, kept far away from his professional sphere.