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Kozinski becomes chief judge of the 9th Circuit
And Carl Tobias has a commentary.
"Still, the "conservative" label does not quite capture Kozinski's jurisprudential views. He has said that a conservative president appointed him and that he tends "to have conservative instincts" but also believes strongly "in important principles of freedom" -- freedom of speech, religion and personal privacy. He once famously explained the 9th Circuit's judicial independence by remarking that its judges were three time zones away from the Supreme Court and the nation's capital.
Stories abound. Kozinski often writes 50 drafts of opinions, working 80-hour weeks alongside his clerks, whom he sends 3 a.m. e-mails. Forty of his clerks have gone on to become Supreme Court clerks."
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Yeah, I believe it was he who wrote the dissent in Silviera v Lockyer.
Yes, I get a cookie. It was him.
"Despite the panel's mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The sheer ponderousness of the panel's opinion -- the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text -- refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel's labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it -- and is just as likely to succeed."
More important that Silviera, he wrote the majority opinion in Stewart. And if you don't know about Stewart, and how the Supremes slammed the door on it with that ridiculous medical marijane opinion in Reich, you have not been paying attention.
Kozinski is The Man. Many of us out there were hoping and praying that Bush would nominate him for the High Court. No such courage from the Man from Maine and the Beltway (Texas, my ass).
Kozinski is pro-second amendment.