Kozinksi, Alex
KOZINKSI, ALEX
KOZINKSI, ALEX (1950– ), U.S. Court of Appeals judge. Born in Bucharest, Romania, Kozinski immigrated to the United States in 1962 with his parents, both Holocaust survivors. He attended public schools and received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (ucla), in 1972. He graduated from ucla Law School in 1975 and was admitted to the California bar that year. From 1975 to 1976 Kozinski served as clerk for Anthony Kennedy, a judge on the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, who later became a Supreme Court justice. In 1976 Kozinski clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger, then in 1977 he entered private practice in Los Angeles. In 1978 he was admitted to the District of Columbia bar, and in 1979 he joined the firm of Covington and Burling as an associate. He was named deputy counsel to the office of president-elect Ronald Reagan in 1980; after Reagan took office in January 1981, Kozinski became assistant counsel in the Office of Counsel to the President. He was appointed special counsel of the Merit Systems Protection Board later that year. In 1982 he was named chief judge on the U.S. Court of Claims. In 1985 President Reagan appointed Kozinski to the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Though considered a conservative jurist, Kozinski gained attention in 2001 for his stand against electronic surveillance in the workplace. The Administrative Office (ao) of the federal judiciary had installed a monitoring system designed to identify federal court workers who were engaging in unauthorized use of the Internet; Kozinski and some of his colleagues protested its use in the Ninth Circuit. In an interview with Newsweek, Kozinski stated that he considered such a surveillance system a violation of court employee's civil rights.
In addition to workplace privacy, Kozinski was involved in other issues, including commercial speech. In a 1990 article, coauthored by law professor Stuart Banner, in the Virginia Law Review, he argued against allowing commercial speech a lower level of protection, warning that existing doctrine "gives government a powerful weapon to suppress or control speech by classifying it as merely commercial."
[Dorothy Bauhoff (2nd ed.)]