The Devil in Judge Kozinski

Judge Alex Kozinski's porn stash turns out to be…not much of a porn stash. The conservative blogger Patterico has uncovered the material in question. (It was sent to him by the same person who tipped off the L.A. Times: Cyrus Sanai, a lawyer with a grudge against the judge.) It seems Kozinski has been accumulating viral Internet humor, some of it X-rated but none of it any less mainstream than a Farrelly Brothers movie. The Times' descriptions of the material were rather misleading: The "slide show striptease featuring a transsexual," for example, turns out to be a quiz where you guess whether you're looking at a natural woman. In the words of Wonkette, this is "the sort of naughtiness you'd find in the dirty birthday cards section at Spencer Gifts."

Nonetheless, we're still hearing calls for Kozinski to recuse himself from the obscenity case he's about to oversee. I hope he stands his ground. There has been no shortage of free-speech trials in which the presiding judges had a moral objection to essentially innocuous material. I don't see any reason why such a case shouldn't be heard by a jurist with a history of tolerance.

Elsewhere in Reason: We interviewed Kozinski back in 2006. The topic of tranny quizzes did not come up.