Alex Kozinski (; born July 23, 1950) is a Romanian-American jurist and lawyer who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1985 to 2017. He was a prominent and influential judge, and many of his law clerks went on to clerk for U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Kozinski's judicial career ended in 2017 when he retired after over a dozen of his former female law clerks and legal staffers accused him of sexual harassment and abusive practices. Kozinski had previously faced an ethics hearing over inappropriate sexual material.
Kozinski was born in July 1950 to a Romanian Jewish family in Bucharest, under the rule of the Romanian People's Republic. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors. Kozinski's father, Moses, spent four years in Transnistrian concentration camps where tens of thousands of Jews perished. His mother, Sabine, lived through the war years in a Romanian ghetto.
In 1958, Kozinski's parents applied to the Romanian government for permission to emigrate from the country. They received permission four years later in 1962, when Kozinski was 12 years old. Kozinski, who had grown up as a committed communist in Bucharest, became what he described as "an instant capitalist" when he took his first trip outside of the Iron Curtain, to Vienna, where he partook of such luxuries as chewing gum and bananas. Kozinski later recounted:
I remember leaving Romania, December 24, 1961. And I still remember being on the train, making plans for myself, how I would to go the West where people were oppressed and I would share my knowledge of Communism and help bring enlightenment by helping to tear down capitalism. ... And the next thing I remember, I was in Vienna, and I got bubblegum and chocolate, which were freely available. It was as though a cloud or veil had lifted. It was such a different world, you had real consumer goods. People weren't running around with shackles. Everything that had been said about the West was untrue. Bananas were plentiful. In Romania, my father used to have to work a half-day to get three bananas. I remember going with my parents to an open-air market in Vienna and seeing all these bananas, cheap, ... and wondering whether they would be there tomorrow. I looked a week later and they were still there. There was no conscious rethinking or recalculating my point of view. I was now an instant and fervent capitalist.
Kozinski's family immigrated to the United States in 1962 and settled in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, where his father ran a small grocery store.
Kozinski studied economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1972 with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude. He then attended the UCLA School of Law, where he was a managing editor of the UCLA Law Review. He graduated in 1975 with a Juris Doctor ranked first in his class.
After law school, Kozinski clerked for judge (later Supreme Court justice) Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1975 to 1976, then for chief justice Warren Burger of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1976 to 1977. He then entered private practice as an associate with the law firms Forry, Golbert, Singer & Gelles from 1977 to 1979 and Covington & Burling from 1979 to 1981. He was a Deputy Legal Counsel of the Office of the President-Elect in Washington, D.C. (1980–81) and an Assistant Counsel for the Office of Counsel to the President in Washington, D.C. (1981). He was a Special Counsel for the Merit Systems Protection Board in Washington, D.C. (1981–82).
Office of Special Counsel incident
While he was in the Office of Special Counsel, despite staff recommendations against termination, Kozinski overruled his staff and then repeatedly tutored Interior Secretary James G. Watt's legal staff in how to rewrite the proposed termination of a mining safety whistleblower so as to pass legal muster. When the incident came to light years later during confirmation hearings for Kozinski's Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals nomination, the scandal drew 43 Senate opposition votes and reportedly subsequently prevented Kozinski's planned promotion to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Kozinski served as a trial judge of the United States Court of Claims in 1982, serving as Chief of Trial Division that year.
Kozinski was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on August 10, 1982, to the United States Claims Court, to a new seat authorized by 96 Stat. 27. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 20, 1982, and received commission on October 1, 1982. He served as Chief Judge from 1982 to 1985. His service terminated on February 9, 1985, due to resignation.
Kozinski was nominated by President Reagan on June 5, 1985, to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, to a new seat created by 98 Stat. 333. Before the confirmation vote took place, former employees from Kozinski's time at the Office of Special Counsel warned the Senate that Kozinski was "harsh, cruel, demeaning, sadistic, disingenuous and without compassion." He was nonetheless confirmed by the United States Senate by a 54–43 vote on November 7, 1985. He received commission the same day. At 35, he was the youngest federal Appeals Court judge at the time of appointment.
In 2005, after concluding that the Ninth Circuit insufficiently addressed breaches of judicial conduct by Judge Manuel Real, after rules had been enacted to discourage behavior that would initiate "a substantial and widespread lowering of public confidence in the courts among reasonable people," Kozinski demanded the actual imposition of higher standards, writing,"It does not inspire confidence in the federal judiciary, when we treat our own so much better than we treat everyone else." Kozinski was persuasive and Real's case was reopened and he was disciplined.
He served as Chief Judge of the circuit from December 1, 2007, to December 1, 2014. In that capacity, he received complaints about Montana Federal Presiding Judge Richard F. Cebull, who had sent hundreds of emails disparaging women, racial minorities and liberal politicians. One joked that President Barack Obama's birth was the product of a sexual relationship between Obama's mother and a dog. Kozinski appointed a five-judge panel to review the matter in which he was the chair. It recommended disciplinary measures but not removal; the particulars of the investigation were largely kept confidential, at Kozinski's initiative.
During his tenure as a court of appeals judge, he became a prominent feeder judge. Between 2009–13, he placed nine of his clerks with the United States Supreme Court, the fifth most of any judge during that time period. He was particularly successful placing his clerks with Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom he had himself clerked.
In the 2000s, while defending the Ninth Circuit against criticism because of a recent controversial decision, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, Kozinski, who had not been part of the case, emphasized judicial independence: "It seems to me that this is what makes this country truly great—that we can have a judiciary where the person who appoints you doesn't own you." He also took a stand against the charge that the Ninth Circuit is overly liberal: "I can say with some confidence that cries that the Ninth Circuit is so liberal are just simply misplaced."
On November 30, 2007, he became the tenth Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit. His term as chief judge ended on December 1, 2014, when he was succeeded by Judge Sidney R. Thomas.