Last year, discussing the surprising success of clothing consultants in the recession, we wrote: “When the going gets tough, the tough get new wardrobes.”

Maybe we should amend that statement: “When the going gets tough, the tough ditch their wardrobes.” Faced with the dismal legal job market, yet another law student has decided to earn extra cash by taking it off for the camera.

In September we reported on Stephanie Christine, a UNC law student who posed nude for Playboy’s “Girls of the ACC” issue. Now, thanks to a horny diligent reader, we’ve learned that Kennedy James (right), a law student at Florida Coastal School of Law, has joined Playboy.com’s “Cyber Club.”

Kennedy was recently honored as “Coed of the Week” by the Playboy Blog. How many law students can claim that accolade? Order of the Coif, suck it.

Kennedy is jokingly described as majoring in “Advanced Sophistry” at Florida Coastal. To preempt the commenters: yes, Florida Coastal is fully accredited by the American Bar Association.

Check out a redacted (and therefore safe-for-work) picture of Kennedy James, plus links to the not-safe-for-work stuff, after the jump.

Some of you, especially the straight males, may recall Stephanie Shimek (née Stephanie Haney). She’s the University of North Carolina law student who tried out for Playboy, to wit, the “Girls of the ACC” issue. We wrote about her in a post entitled “Career Alternatives for Law Students: Playboy Bunny.”

Multiple ATL readers — who read Playboy just for the articles, we’re sure — have alerted us to the good news: Stephanie made it into the magazine! WCHL reports:

A UNC student has had her dreams of being featured in Playboy magazine come true in the 2009 October ‘Girls of ACC” issue.

Twenty-four year old Stephanie Christine says ever since she first picked up a copy of the magazine at her aunt’s house, she wanted to be like one of the Bunnies.

That’s one open-minded aunt! (Based on an interview with Stephanie on the WCHL website, however, it seems that the issues belonged to her uncle — no lesbianic aunt here.)

Stephanie is a 3L, and as we’ve discussed, 3L recruiting is a nightmare this year. But don’t worry about Steph; she has backup options. According to WCHL, she aspires to work in entertainment law — but if that doesn’t work out, “[f]uture involvement with Playboy has been extended to her.” In addition, “her parents and family have been really supportive.”

As diligent journalists, we went out to a local newsstand and picked up a copy of Playboy’s “Sex on Campus 2009” issue. After showing photo ID — we got carded (yesss!!!) — and plunking down $5.99, we took the plastic-wrapped periodical back to the office, where Elie gave us a brief tutorial in female anatomy. (We’ve never seen a woman’s private parts in real life, except this one time we went to a nude beach in France.)

After the jump, we present you with pictures of Stephanie, plus one other young woman who aspires to a legal career. We have carefully redacted the photos — drawing on skills honed during document review years ago, before online doc review became commonplace — so they are safe for work. Enjoy.

We’ve written extensively in the past about law students and lawyers taking their clothes off for the camera. For whatever reason, most have been women. For example:

an associate from Thacher Proffitt (& Wood — hehe), who previously posed for Playboy;

a U. Miami law school graduate, who also posed for Playboy;

a UNC law student, who auditioned for Playboy’s pages; and

a Brooklyn law student, who appeared on Playboy TV.

But we are equal opportunity oglers here at Above the Law. We’re more than happy to write about naked male hotties (or clothed male hotties, at Davis Polk).

Meet “Jacob” (surely not his real name). He’s a male law student who has turned to performing in gay pornography to pay his tuition.

NOTE: We’ve included a screencap. It is safe for work, but it does include shots of a shirtless man, which some may find risqué. Accordingly, we’ve posted the image AFTER THE JUMP.

Do NOT click on the “Continue reading” link below unless you are prepared to see some skin. Thanks.

Despite the rise in applications to law schools, many current law school students might be lamenting their decision to pursue a J.D. There’s more news about Biglaw firms firing than hiring these days. Summer associate programs are shrinking in size, being shortened, or being cut altogether. Start dates for 3Ls are being pushed back to next decade. What’s a law student to do?

Instead of aiming to get her head shot on the website at Boies Schiller, one (alleged) UNC 2L is doing an OCI hoping to get into the pages of Playboy. The men’s magazine is recruiting students from across the country for its college issue and is at UNC looking for models for “Girls of the ACC.” From the Daily Tar Heel:

Second-year law student Stephanie Haney, 24, said that she would be honored if chosen. “The women in Playboy are the most beautiful women in the world,” she said.

Haney said she would only pursue modeling in the short run so she can finish school. But she’s willing to put her degree on hold. “I feel like this is something you have to take if it comes up,” Haney said.

If “it comes up,” it would be a good sign for Haney’s future in pornography, or as she refers to it, “the entertainment and image industry.”

More discussion, plus some UPDATES, after the jump.

* United Airlines settled a suit filed by a former pilot, who resigned after repeatedly finding porn in hidden places in her cockpit, including underneath a cap on a safety device called a “stick shaker” (no pun intended). Click to see United’s ridiculous effort to dismiss. [The Seattle Times]

* Attorney General Andrew Cuomo convinced 9 out of the top 10 bonus recipients at AIG to return their bonuses. Who is number 10? [The New York Times]

* Barney Frank called Antonin Scalia a “homophobe.” [The Associated Press]

* It turns out that Madoff has more than $1 billion worth of assets and the french authorities plan to seize his chateau in Cap d’Antibe, France, so maybe his victims can get a time share? No? [The Associated Press]

* A court battle between billionaire Wilbur Ross and hedge fund manager Bruce Rose may be the key to understanding the housing crisis. [Bloomberg]

* A sex-discrimination suit against Wal-Mart reaches the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals today. 200 female employees say women in comparable jobs don’t get paid as much as men. [The Huffington Post]

* Preservationists think a landmark case in Chicago is cause for alarm. [The New York Times]

Diedre Dare is a senior lawyer in Allen & Overy’s Russia office. Like many an expat, she’s been maintaining a website, presumably to keep folks back home up to date on her life and to share the splendor of living abroad with random strangers on the Internet.

On the website, Philosophy Can Be Sexy, she posts poetry, photos of herself in lingerie, “philosophy” (if a quote from the “Marriage Delusion” counts), and a serialized novel about the expat life in Moscow.

Allen & Overy was not too pleased to discover the novel. Per the Daily Mail:

Miss Dare, who is thought to earn £150,000 a year at the firm’s Russian office, is calling her steamy online novel, Expat: A Weekly Serialized Novel About Living in Moscow.

It describes the sordid lifestyle pursued by staff at a British-led professional firm in the capital.

Miss Dare’s promiscuous heroine describes herself as a ‘part drug addict, part alcoholic’ who regularly turns up for work hours late and hungover.

She and her colleagues are constantly seeking new sexual conquests, attend obscene sex shows involving donkeys and dwarves, blow fortunes at expensive restaurants and gossip about where they are planning to get drunk next.

Sounds like working abroad is like being a summer associate all year long. An erotic excerpt for the grammarians among you, after the jump.

* Obama made the order to close Guantanamo within a year and former U.S. attorney David Iglesias has been hired to prosecute suspected terrorists held at the prison. [The Associated Press]

* Caroline Kennedy withdrew her Senate bid, so all that press was much ado about nothing. [The New York Times]

* The Chinese court sentenced two to death and one to a life prison sentence for their role in the tainted milk scandal. [The International Herald Tribune]

* SCOTUS refused to reconsider COPA Wednesday, and agreed that a Massachusetts family could sue the school district for sex discrimination.[The Associated Press]

* A Bank of America shareholder is accusing the bank of withholding information about Merrill Lynch’s $15.3 billion in losses before the shareholders voted on its acquisition. [Bloomberg]

In our occasional series on career alternatives for attorneys — i.e., things you can do with a law degree that don’t involve working for a law firm as an associate or contract attorney — we’ve already touched on the writer/author career option. But when we happened upon How I Went From an NYU Law Student to a Smut Writer, we couldn’t help but return to entertaining the idea of book-writing as an alternative career.

Admittedly, Rachel Kramer Bussel never actually became an attorney, as she dropped out of NYU Law before completing her J.D. She recently guest-blogged on Jewcy, a “premier Jewish media and entertainment outlet for progressive free-thinkers.” There, she explained why she traded the Bluebook for blue balls books:

Today I want to share how I went from an NYU Law student to the editor of 24 anthologies ranging from spanking to foot fetishes to exhibitionism to crossdressing. You could say it’s all because of Monica Lewinsky. She was the protagonist of my first published story, called “Monica and Me,” written circa 1999. It was a fantasy about, well, Monica and me, about what would happen if I (or rather, my narrator) met her at a booksigning.

Thanks to Google Books, you can read an excerpt from Monica and Me. Warning: After she described Monica as “ever-luscious” in the first paragraph, we found it hard to continue reading.

I took something true (my crush on her) and turned it into fiction for a book of celebrity sex fantasies called Starf*cker. That was just as I was leaving law school, uncertain about my future (I never graduated from law school). I went on to work at various administrative jobs, and kept on writing in my spare time. I wrote and submitted and [sic] erotica story every few months, many of them true, about my budding sexual explorations, and found getting published to be a thrill I fast became addicted to.

In addition to writing and editing porn, she teaches writing workshops. Bussel claims that you can eroticize just about anything. She says that two of the exercises in her workshops are “write a story involving a chair, and write a story involving George W. Bush.” The chair seems easy, but putting Bush in a porn story is just wrong. Right?

If you’re thinking about a foray into porn writing yourself, we offer an exercise of our own. Write a story eroticizing a massive doc review, your managing partner, and creative billing codes. Good luck!

How I Went From an NYU Law Student to a Smut Writer [Jewcy]

Earlier: Career Alternatives for Attorneys

* A couple is suing United Airlines for “overserving” the husband by serving him red wine every 20 minutes on the flight. They say this is what caused him to beat his wife on the way to customs. [Chicago Tribune]

* “Federal judges in some parts of the United States are delaying the swearing-in of new citizens, apparently so that courts can keep millions of dollars in naturalization fees paid by immigrants, according to a new government report.” [The Washington Post]

* A Rhode Island family sued their cable provider for hooking up the Playboy channel, which plays hardcore porn. [Courthouse News Service]

* Investors in Madoff’s ponzi scheme might be able to get back some of their money by filing for a U.S. tax refund. As if the U.S. government isn’t paying out enough money these days…[Bloomberg.com]

* The high court in Europe says a UK couple should be bound by the ruling of judge in southern Cyprus that they demolish their vacation home. The house is built on land that belongs to a Greek Cypriot who claims it was taken from him during the Turkish invasion in 1974. [BBC News]

A tipster asked us: “Did you catch this week’s Law & Order - SVU? The judge had to recuse himself because they found porn on his computer during the course of a porn-addiction case.”

Sound familiar? It may remind you of this recent case (although the L&O episode involved dolphins rather than donkeys).

More after the jump.

* Thailand’s constitutional court decided to disband the country’s ruling party and ban the prime minister from politics for five years. [CNN.com]

* A former federal courts chief is calling for the resignation or impeachment of an appellate judge in California for watching internet porn. In one month, there were 90,000 hits on 1,100 porn sites at the California Judiciary. [Miami Herald]

* Al Franken, the Senate candidate from Minnesota, may appeal to the courts because he argues that 1,000 absentee ballots were wrongly discarded in the recount. [CBS]

* The US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the city of Garden Grove in California that argued that city police should not have to return seized medical marijuana to a chronic pain patient. California’s 4th District Court of Appeal sided with the patient, and now the case is closed, a victory for advocates of medical marijuana use. [The Los Angeles Times]

* At least something is going well for Detroit these days. “U.S. car maker Ford Motor Company Tuesday won its case at a European court over the registration of the word “Fun” as a European trademark.” [CNN]

* Chevron was found not-guilty by a federal court jury in San Francisco; the jury dismissed claims of Nigerian villagers who say they were attacked by company paid soldiers on an an off-shore drilling platform. [Bloomberg]

* Don’t forget, meet the editors is tonight at 6:30 at Professor Thoms’ [Above The Law]

The homepage of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher asks: “What makes Gibson unlike any other firm?” One of our tipsters offers one possibility: Gibson summer associates have moonlight careers.

Found it funny that the model on the front page of this support site for adult websites is also the model on the Gibson Dunn career site (go to Hiring, then Law Student).

Tough Market, j/k.

We find it funny that you are on the support site page for adult websites, tipster. The support page links to such delightful sites as “Arab Street Hookers,” “Human Toilet Bowls,” and “The Amputee.”

We’ve gone back and forth between the Gibson and Porn Support site photos, and there is a strong resemblance. What do you think?

If you have a small penis the only thing you can do about it is buy a gun.

I can finally say that with the authority of judicial precedent behind me. As the WSJ Law Blog reported yesterday, Steve Warshak, founder of Enzyte, was sentenced to 25 for defrauding sad, pathetic men.

I have often watched the late night replay of the Daily Show and Colbert and wished, nay prayed, that somebody would put an end to this stupid ad-campaign so I could get back to Girls Gone Wild promos. Though U.S. District Judge S. Arthur Spiegel ruled that the company would be allowed to stay in business, one expects civil litigation to destroy once and forever the concept of “natural male enhancement.”

There are lots of penis products on television, usually in the form of car commercials. But the lack of subtlety from these Enzyte jerks is just totally out of place for the quiet, drunken depression that marks watching late night television. Get out of my head Smilin’ Bob, I do not believe you!

Now if we could only get rid of commercials telling me that I have to keep it up for 36 hours, life would be better.

Fraudulent Male Enhancement Drug Gets Company Founder 25 Yrs. [WSJ Law Blog]

[Ed. note: This post is by FROLIC & DETOUR, one of the finalists in ATL Idol, the “reality blogging” competition that will determine ATL’s next editor. It is marked with Frolic & Detour’s avatar (at right).]




A man claiming to be a police detective entered a Longmont, Colo. adult store and demanded to see the X-rated videos for free.

The ponytailed man claimed he was an officer in the “age verification unit,” and he had to ensure that the performers in the porn videos weren’t underage.

“It was inventive on his part, I’ll give him that,” said the real police officer investigating the case.

Somehow, the video clerks weren’t convinced by the man’s business card, which had no name on it. Since the scheme didn’t work the first time, the man tried it a second and then a third time…at the same store. Unfortunately, Randal wasn’t there that day, and the clerks called the cops.

The man may drive a red Dodge neon, which explains why he isn’t getting laid.

If you asked people to name sexually liberated Greek islands, many might pick Lesbos. Over the objections of some Lesbos residents, who have even filed a lawsuit over the matter, the name of their beloved island is inextricably linked with lesbian romance (and girl-on-girl action).

But we think Zakynthos also deserves some love, in light of this bizarre crime story. From Reuters:

Nine British women were facing prostitution charges after being arrested at the weekend for taking part in an oral sex competition in the Greek holiday island of Zakynthos, police said on Monday.

Six British and six Greek men, including two bar owners, were also charged in the incident, which took place at Laganas beach in the south of the Ionian island, which lies off the west coast of mainland Greece, police said.

The women, who came to the popular resort on holiday, had been paid to take part in the competition, which was video recorded and was to be posted on the Internet, police said.

Interesting that the women were charged with prostitution. When we previously wrote about a concubine-seeking Craigslister, one commenter wondered:

I’ve never understood why people don’t offer prostitutes an oral contract (no pun intended) to appear in a porno movie and then throw a camera next the bed during whatever acts go down (pun intended). Technically, the john isn’t paying for sex. Instead it’s art!

Alas, based on the charges in this case, that defense probably wouldn’t fly on Zakynthos. Paying women to have sex with you, then claiming when caught that you’re just filming an X-rated version of Mamma Mia! — by the way, the non-explicit version opens this weekend (yay Meryl!) — is unlikely to get you off, literally or figuratively.

More mildly raunchy discussion — if your sensibilities are delicate, stop reading here — after the jump.

We have. So, barring major new developments, we’re cutting back on our coverage of the controversy surrounding Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit. As we suggested yesterday, the story is petering out anyway; but if you’re still interested in following it, check out Patterico’s Pontifications, which has been offering excellent, wall-to-wall coverage.

Before we take our leave of this tale, here are a few notable links:

1. Judges Named To Head Kozinski Inquiry [AP]

This is the only real news to emerge since our last post. Chief Justice John Roberts, responding to Chief Judge Kozinski’s request for an investigation, has named five jurists to the investigatory panel: Chief Judge Anthony Scirica, Judge Marjorie Rendell, and Judge Walter Stapleton, of the Third Circuit; Chief Judge Harvey Bartle III (E.D. Pa.); and Chief Judge Garrett Brown Jr. (D.N.J.). This is a solid group of judges; expect their investigation to be thorough and proper.

2. Cyrus Sanai: Kozinski investigation “is part of a litigation strategy” [Overlawyered]

The Kozinski archenemy who tipped off the Los Angeles Times to the judge’s website — L.A. lawyer Cyrus Sanai, who has been feuding with the judge since 2005 — is a real piece of work. At Overlawyered, Ted Frank chronicles how Sanai has been benchslapped by numerous judges, both federal and state, at the trial and appellate levels. Sanai blames the mountain of adverse on rulings on bias. Frank writes:

One has much sympathy for Cyrus Sanai, who has suffered the extraordinary misfortune of four trial judges in three different jurisdictions who are biased against him, and that does not include the appellate judges like the Chief Justice of the Washington State Supreme Court, Gerry Alexander; Washington State Court of Appeals judges Marlin Applewick, Anne Ellington and William Baker; or Judge Kozinski on the Ninth Circuit, all of whom Sanai has accused of bias. We wish that a just result is reached in Sanai’s various appeals, and pray that a just result is reached if a California legal disciplinary body ever decides to investigate what biased judges have been saying about Sanai.

3. Who’s at Fault For the Kozinski Kerfluffle? [Simple Justice]

Scott Greenfield writes:

David Lat, who has feasted on unsubstantiated gossip at Above the Law as well as his blog dedicated to sifting the salacious from the judicious, Underneath Their Robes (where he blogged anonymously as Article III Groupie, or A3G as he came to be known), joins the chorus [of Kozinski defenders]. But does the former AUSA explain his sudden conversion? Isn’t this the guy who is first on line (and online) to publish a smear of any lawyer or judge? In fairness, Lat’s connection to Kozinski is well-known to his long-time followers, but the new reader would be left out in the cold.

As Greenfield suggests, we view our connection to Chief Judge Kozinski as very well-known, and therefore not worth belaboring. But if he wants some sort of formal disclosure, here it is.

Disclosure: We have a great deal of respect and affection for Chief Judge Kozinski, whom we consider a friend. He helped launch our blogging career with his support of our first foray into the blogosphere, Underneath Their Robes (started four years ago this month). Our coverage of him is biased. If you’d like to read harsh personal attacks upon Chief Judge Kozinski, you should look elsewhere.

Above the Law is an independent blog. Unlike MSM-sponsored blogs such as the WSJ or the BLT, ATL makes no claim to “objectivity.” Considering that we opine daily on all sorts of topics, in ways that would be unacceptable for pure news reporters to do, we don’t see how anyone could mistake ATL for an objective news source. But if you want an express disclaimer of objectivity, consider this it.

Finally, we’d like to clarify our views of the “Kozinski Kerfluffle,” as Greenfield aptly dubs it. Consistent with our general antipathy to privacy, we don’t entirely agree with observers who see what Sanai and the L.A. Times did as an egregious privacy violation. On this we agree with Ted Frank:

I don’t think I fully endorse Lessig’s view on this — accessing a directory on a public website may be slightly creepy, but it’s not the same as breaking and entering a house to peer inside the photo albums in the den; it’s not even at the level of obnoxiousness as a guest inspecting the medicine cabinets of a host’s bathroom.

What we do think, however, is that the whole matter has become completely overblown. All it shows is that federal judges enjoy the occasional dirty joke and have risque material on their computers — in other words, “they’re just like us.” Considering that we launched a blog devoted to this very proposition four years ago, we find it hard to get that excited about it now.

4. Defending Judge Kozinski, and Online Privacy [The Lede / NYT]

ATL gets a shout-out from Mike Nizza in the Lede, a New York Times blog, in this concise round-up of the latest developments.

Judges named to head Kozinski inquiry [AP]
Cyrus Sanai: Kozinski investigation “is part of a litigation strategy” [Overlawyered]
Who’s at Fault For the Kozinski Kerfluffle? [Simple Justice]
Defending Judge Kozinski, and Online Privacy [The Lede / New York Times]

Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski (scroll down)

The controversy surrounding Chief Judge Alex Kozinski is rapidly dissipating — and with good reason. He has recused himself from the Ira Isaacs obscenity trial, and he’s called for an investigation of any potential misconduct on his part. So, to quote his website, “Ain’t nothin’ here. Y’all best be movin’ on, compadre.”

We’ve read tons of Kozinski coverage (so you don’t have to). Here are three of the most important posts:

1. The wife of Chief Judge Kozinski has come to his defense, over at Patterico’s Pontifications:

My name is Marcy Tiffany. I have been married to Alex Kozinski for over thirty years and we have raised three sons together….. [T]he LA Times story, authored by Scott Glover, is riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies. One significant mischaracterization is that Alex was maintaining some kind of “website” to which he posted pornographic material.

Obviously, Glover’s use of the word “website” was intended to convey a false image of a carefully designed and maintained graphical interface, with text, pictures, sound and hyperlinks, such as businesses maintain or that individuals can set up on Facebook, rather than a bunch of random files located in one of many folders stored on our family’s file server. The “server” is actually just another home computer that sits next to my desk in our home office, and that we use to store files, perform back-ups, and route the Internet to the family network. It has no graphical interface, but if you know the precise location of a file, you can access it either from one of the home computers or remotely.

Using the term “website” also gives the impression that Alex was actively aware of all of the material, when, in fact, it had accumulated over a number of years and he didn’t even remember that some of that stuff had been stored there or whether it had been put there by him or one of our sons, who also have access to the server.

That’s just an excerpt; read the whole thing over here.

2. Professor Eugene Volokh, a former clerk to Chief Judge Kozinski, offers his thoughts over at the Volokh Conspiracy. Money quote:

Kozinski has a quirky sense of humor, and keeps some joke pictures and videos on his computer rather than throwing them away. I’m sure they aren’t the kinds of things some people would enjoy seeing. But he wasn’t trying to show them to those people! He was just minding his own business, keeping some files on his own private server. And now it’s a national news story.

Enough already.

3. Professor Volokh’s post concludes by quoting the analysis of Professor Lawrence Lessig, another leading legal academic and cyberlaw guru. Professor Lessig writes:

When it comes to government invasions of our privacy, we are (and rightly) a privacy obsessed people. We need to extend some of that obsession to the increasingly common violations by private people against other private people. There is nothing for Chief Judge Kozinski to defend because he has violated no law, and we live in a free society (or so he thought when he immigrated from Romania). A free society should feed the right to be left alone, including the right not to have to defend publicly private choices and taste, by learning not to feed the privacy trolls.

That’s just the tail end of a long and thoughtful post. Read it in full by clicking here.

Alex Kozinski’s Wife Speaks Out [Patterico’s Pontifications via Volokh Conspiracy (Jonathan Adler)]
Alex Kozinski [Volokh Conspiracy (Eugene Volokh)]
The Kozinski mess [Lessig Blog (Larry Lessig)]

We’ve been following the controversy around Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit after the discovery of sexually explicit material on his personal website. Our posts are collected here.

Given the firestorm of coverage in the last few days, this latest news may not be surprising:

A federal appeals court judge today recused himself from a closely-watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles, three days after acknowledging that he had posted sexually explicit material on a publicly accessible personal website.

“In light of the public controversy surrounding my involvement in this case, I have concluded that there is a manifest necessity to declare a mistrial,” said Alex Kozinski, chief judge for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. “I will recuse myself from further participation in the case and will ask the chief judge of the district court to reassign it to another judge.”

Yesterday, Kozinski called for an investigation of himself. He continues to handle this with dignity, or as much dignity as one can when there’s talk of cow porn.

Judge Alex Kozinski recuses himself from obscenity trial [Los Angeles Times]

Earlier: Coverage of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski (scroll down)

Apologies for the downtime. We were off being interviewed by CNN Headline News about the controversy surrounding Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit. We’ll post a link to the interview if and when it becomes available.

Speaking of Chief Judge Kozinski, here’s the latest news:

The 9th Circuit judge, who posted sexually explicit material on his own site, according to a Los Angeles Times story yesterday, has just released this statement:

I have asked the Judicial Council of the Ninth Circuit to take steps pursuant to Rule 26, of the Rules Governing Judicial Conduct and Disability, and to initiate proceedings concerning the article that appeared in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. I will cooperate fully in any investigation.

Is it unusual for a judge to call for an investigation of himself? Sure. But it’s a testament to Chief Judge Kozinski’s integrity and forthrightness; he’s not trying to hide anything underneath his robe. This is a smart move, a lesson in good crisis management.

Kozinski Calls for Investigation of Himself [WSJ Law Blog]
Judge wants panel to investigate his porn postings [Associated Press]

Too… much…. information. Yes, we’re talking about the controversy over Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit, who’s presiding over the Ira Isaacs obscenity trial in Los Angeles, and who uploaded some materials to a shared family website that contained some sexual images (among many other things).

This controversy is “TMI” in more ways than one. There has been such a torrent of news and legal blog coverage that we’re still getting up to speed. We’ll have more detailed thoughts later. Our extensive past coverage appears here, here, and here.

In the meantime, here’s an open thread for discussion, plus some material to keep you occupied: (1) an extensive collection of links related to this matter, to both mainstream media sources and blogs, as well as selected material obtained from Chief Judge Kozinski’s site; and (2) a pair of reader polls (one from yesterday, still open, and one new, prompted by comments like this one).

NEWS COVERAGE
Judge suspends L.A. obscenity trial after conceding his website had sexual images [Los Angeles Times]
Porn Stash Puts Obscenity Case Judge in Awkward Spot [New York Sun]
Chief Judge Contributed to Racy Web Site [New York Times]
Report: Smut-case judge posted explicit images [AP]
Judge Assailed Over Sexually Explicit Images on Web Site [Washington Post]
Obscenity Trial Suspended After Report That Judge Posted Sexual Images [WSJ Law Blog]

BLOGOSPHERE COVERAGE
The L.A. Times’s Tipster on Kozinski’s Porn: Cyrus Sanai [Patterico’s Pontifications]
More on Cyrus Sanai’s Campaign Against Judge Kozinski [Patterico’s Pontifications]
The L.A. Times’s Tipster [How Appealing (Howard Bashman)]
The Kozinski Circus [Convictions / Slate (Emily Bazelon)]
Should Litigants in Obscenity Case Before Judge Kozinski Moo-ve for a Mistrial? [Legal Blog Watch (Carolyn Elefant)]
Judges Gone Wild [Concurring Opinions (Kaimipono Wanger)]
News judgments about Kozinski’s porn [LawBeat (Mark Obbie) via How Appealing]

COLLECTED MATERIALS FROM CHIEF JUDGE KOZINSKI’S WEBSITE
[Warning: NSFW]
What “Stuff” was on Judge Kozinski’s Personal Website? [Celebrity Justice / USLaw.com]
Exclusive: Kozinski’s Porn — Images from Judge Alex Kozinski’s Web Site [Patterico’s Pontifications]
[Warning: NSFW]

Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski (scroll down)