Apochiefosis:
My former boss, Judge Kozinski, is becoming the Ninth Circuit's Chief Judge this Dec. 1. "The chief judge of the circuit assumes the position based on seniority. The chief judge is the judge in regular active service who is senior in commission of those judges who are (1) 64 years of age or under; (2) have served for one year or more as a circuit judge; and (3) have not served previously as chief judge. Judge Kozinski also believes that looks count, though he can provide no support for that proposition."
Judge Kozinski is sentenced to serve a seven-year term, or 84 months, as we former federal clerks like to say.
Besides being much more conservative than either of those judges (or current Chief Judge Schroeder), he is also the best writer on the Ninth Circuit. I hope his administrative duties don't get in the way of his incisive writing style.
And yes, it is a pure pleasure to read a Kozinski opinion.
This is obviously a subjective judgment. FWIW, I have found that it is one shared by many, many law students and law professors, and it is one almost universally NOT shared by most lawyers and judges. In both instances, politics does not enter the equation -- it's just the people who actually have to apply those opinions and/or are affected by them don't find them "well written." Rather, he seems much more concerned with entertaining law students and their professors with snide comments rather than with writing clear opinions with cogent reasoning that is easily applied in other cases.
Nah, he's much more concerned with the latter (as I think his opinions demonstrate), but he is concerned with both.
One of my pet peeves is sentences handed out in terms of months, which I suspect somewhat removes just how many years the defendant will be serving from the conscience. It doesn't sound as bad to say a prisoner will be serving "84 months" than saying he will be incarcerated for 7 years. Or so it seems. Could you enlighten us, as a former clerk, if this mitigating effect I postulate does in fact exist?
Sentences are not imposed in twelve-month increments. Most sentences can't be stated in terms of years alone. Rather than state same in terms of years, others months and still others years + months, it makes sense to use one method for all of them. Months is the only one that works.
It might sound a little odd to a layperson, but I can assure you that judges quite quickly adapt to thinking in terms of months and fully understand the magnitude of the sentences they impose. Most federal judges are capable of dividing by 12, after all.
It has been quite a while since I was a law student--and I have never been a law professor (for that matter, I never had a judicial clerkship either). As a practitioner who has argued in front of Judge Kozinski twice and one who reads a fair share of the Ninth Circuit opinions (both published and unpublished), I appreciate his lucid writing style, even when I disagree with the ultimate conclusion.
An unforunate part of the case method is that students think that between the bad writing permeating many opinions and the legalese in most canned contracts, legal writing has to be awful and difficult to follow. Judge Kozinski's opinions cut through the crap. I believe in clear legal writing and his opinions provid it.
Look at it this way, who is easier to read, Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas? Even if they would reach the same conclusion, I would rather read a Scalia opinion any day of the week over one authored by Justice Thomas.
Judge Kozinski is one of the few conservative libertarians with the intellectual integrity to state publicly that Kelo was correctly decided. He’s a straight shooter, and one of the best writers on the bench.
Actually, I find them both quite readable, in comparison to most other appellate opinions. Many of Justice Thomas's majority opinions are dull because, for some reason, he was assigned a lot of boring cases. (Not sure why.) His separate opinions tend to make better reading. His concurrence in Graham v. Collins is the best opinion on the death penalty written in the post-Furman era. His dissent in Virginia v. Black is good reading, even if one does not agree with the conclusion.
And the fact that months aren't all the same length doesn't trouble anyone?
years aren't all the same length either. Do you want sentences in terms of days?
As for Judge Kozinski, he is indeed one of the best writers on the federal bench. Lawyers, or at least litigators, ought to make it a habit to read recent opinions by judges with the best writing skills.
Hold onto your hat for this one: according to Relativity Theory, it's even worse than you think.
I don't understand qualification #2. If a judge is senior in commission he's likely to have served for at least one year anyway. But if he hasn't and is still senior doesn't this mean that all of the other judges on the court also have less than one year on the court? What am I missing?
Am I the only one who thought that the statement was also a compliment to (current) Chief Judge Schroeder?
Hold onto your hat for this one: according to Relativity Theory, it's even worse than you think.
Will you people be quiet, please? It's way worse than that. Merely taking notice of the nature of time space will destroy the universe. So it's probably better to just stick to months and not ask any further questions.
God... lawyers wreck *everything*...