Quote of the Day
Whatever may have been left of the Fourth Amendment after [United States v. Black] is now gone. The evisceration of this crucial constitutional protector of the sanctity and privacy of what Americans consider their castles is pretty much complete. Welcome to the fish bowl.
February 24th, 2010 at 10:26 am
Kosinski is never afraid to speak his opinion. Too bad we can have his libertarian butt on the SCOTUS.
February 24th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Sure we can. We need to get the next president to put him on the SCOTUS.
February 24th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Definitely one of my dream SCOTUS picks.
But Judge Andrew Kleinfeld of Alaska (also 9th Circuit) is right up there too. Just as incisive as Kozinski and more humble, less prone to “rock star” syndrome and personal drama.
Alas, Kleinfeld is 64, too old for SCOTUS promotion by contemporary standards.
He’s still the man.
February 25th, 2010 at 12:24 am
My favorite Kozinski quote:
“Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or . . . the press” also means the Internet, and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths. When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases–or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.
It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as spring-boards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences. . . .
All too many of the other great tragedies of history— Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few—were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars. My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history.”
From here:
http://notabug.com/kozinski/silveira_v_lockyer
February 25th, 2010 at 12:50 am
Yes. That opinion (dissent from denial of rehearing en banc in Silveira v. Lockyer) is perhaps Kozinski’s greatest.