Alex Kozinski

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. Early life Kozinski was born in July 1950 to a Romanian Jewish family in Bucharest, under the rule of the Socialist Republic of Romania. 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. Of his childhood, Kozinski has said, "living under communism and having grown up with Holocaust stories has made me more suspicious than other people about what the government tells you is true or good for you." 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 and "left Romania hoping to persuade the world of communism," 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: