Alex Kozinski, a federal appeals court judge in California, was a little miffed last year when a blog called Underneath Their Robes, a dishy hybrid of People magazine and The Harvard Law Review, failed to list him as a candidate for “male superhottie of the federal judiciary.”
So he nominated himself (“discerning females and gay men find graying, pudgy middle-aged men with an accent close to Gov. Schwarzenegger’s almost totally irresistible”), and he won.
Yesterday, Judge Kozinski was mourning what was apparently the death of the blog. Soon after The New Yorker magazine disclosed on Monday that its author was not, as the blog claimed, a female lawyer at a big firm with a taste for gossip and luxury goods, but rather a male federal prosecutor in Newark, the site disappeared behind a password-protected virtual wall.
Judges and their law clerks made up much of the site’s readership, and several said yesterday that they had found its mixture of judicial celebrity sightings and over-the-top commentary irresistible.
In one of its last posts, the blog defended its judicial beauty contests with a play on the Latin phrase for “the thing speaks for itself.”
“Have you seen Judge Kimba Wood and Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw?” the blog asked. “Babes ipsa loquitur!!!”
The blog’s author was until recently known only as Article III Groupie, after the part of the Constitution concerning the judiciary. A year ago, another fan, Richard A. Posner, a federal appeals court judge in Chicago, voiced doubts about whether the female diva persona should be taken seriously.
