Federal judge accused of harassment quits
SAN FRANCISCO — The sexual misconduct allegations that have cut a swath through Congress brought down a prominent member of the judicial branch Monday with the resignation of Alex Kozinski, a federal appeals court judge known for his blunt and colorful legal opinions.
Kozinski, a 67-year-old member and former chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s largest federal appeals court, said in a statement that a battle over the accusations would not be good for the judiciary. He retired, effective immediately. The move came days after the 9th Circuit opened a misconduct inquiry following Washington Post stories that said 15 women — some of whom worked for him as law clerks or in other positions — accused him of groping them, making lewd comments or showing them pornography.
Kozinski said that while speaking in a “candid way” with clerks, he “may not have been mindful enough of the special challenges and pressures that women face in the workplace.”
“It grieves me to learn that I caused any of my clerks to feel uncomfortable; this was never my intent,” he said. “For this I sincerely apologize.”
The 9th Circuit hears cases from nine Western states and has been bitterly criticized by President Donald Trump following rulings that blocked his travel ban.
The son of Holocaust survivors from Romania, Kozinski was appointed to the appeals court in 1985 when he was in his mid-30s by Republican President Ronald Reagan. He has called himself a libertarian.
Clerkships in his office were prestigious, with many of his clerks landing positions working for U.S Supreme Court justices.
Kozinski was an eccentric. He crammed over 200 movie titles into a 1990 opinion in a lawsuit involving a movie theater chain. In another dispute, he ended one ruling with the words: “The parties are advised to chill.”
In another case, he wrote that lethal injection should be scrapped in favor of the firing squad, saying, “Sure, firing squads can be messy, but if we are willing to carry out executions, we should not shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood.”
He once maintained a publicly accessible website of pornography, which he defended to the Los Angeles Times in 2008.
“I think it’s odd and interesting,” he said. “It’s part of life.”