Porn Free, as Free as the Wind Blows, as Free as the Grass Grows, Porn Free

In today's Los Angeles Times story, "Upcoming trial will see hours of hard-core fetish pornography," there is an interesting detail about the presiding judge's attitude about screening software. Judge Alex Kozinski, who has his own "unofficial" page is known as an opponent of Internet filters.

When he learned that there were filters banning pornography and other materials from computers in the appeals court's Pasadena offices, he led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

"I did some rabble-rousing about it," Kozinski said in a brief interview last week. He said he was made aware of the issue when a law clerk researching a case was banned from accessing a gay bookstore's website.

"I didn't think the bureaucrats in Washington should decide what the federal judiciary should have access to," the judge said. "I thought that was incredibly arrogant for them to decide on their own."

For more on Kozinski's interest in public online life, see his odd letter to the editor in The New York Times in which he vies for the title of "judicial hottie" from a gossip blog that specializes in the federal judiciary. Although the author of the blog Kozinski references poses as a female, SCOTUS watch at the Times reports otherwise, and several high-profile feminist bloggers subsequently complained about author David Lat's "blogging in drag" while propagating judging women only by their looks.