DISCRIMINATING JUDGE?
A federal judge rejected a libel suit filed by a Brooklyn attorney against Second Circuit Court Judge Robert A. Katzmann yesterday, a case that remains shrouded in administrative clouds. The New York Law Journal reports that the attorney Loretta McHenry had been fired by her employer, One Beacon Insurance, for "negative and disruptive" actions in 2003, and she sued for discrimination. That claim was tossed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. In the affirmation, the attorney contended, Katzmann's writings amounted to the "equivalent of an assault.” McHenry mounted a prose defamation suit against the judge. According to the Law Journal, the allegedly defamatory decision was "deleted at the request of the Court.” "Nothing in plaintiff's complaint suggests that Judge Katzmann took nonjudicial actions against plaintiff or that his judicial actions were taken in the 'complete absence of jurisdiction,'" ruled Judge Irizarry in her decision yesterday.

NO SPAM FOR THE PRESIDENT
The besieged Bush administration received a judicial boost yesterday as a District Judge ruled that it does not have to account for millions of emails that might have been lost. The New York Times has the story. Federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly decided that the Office of Administration — the bureaucratic office in charge of White House emails — was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. In her decision, she called the email office’s function “strictly administrative,” and therefore immune to FOIA requests made by the good government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The group sued when a FOIA request was not met in August 2007, attempting to account for potentially millions of emails that the administration may have lost. Following that suit, the White House reversed a 30-year-old policy of granting FOIA requests for files at the Office of Administration. Since then, another watchdog group, National Security Archive, has filed a similar lawsuit to obtain records about lost or deleted emails from that office. The Times noted, “in that case, a judge is considering whether to instruct the executive office of the president on steps it must take to safeguard electronic messages.”

SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE
Beleaguered Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski received some public support from his wife, according to The New York Post. The judge had declared a mistrial in a prominent obscenity case yesterday after the press reported that the judge had a collection of pornographic images and video on his personal server — a collection without password protection. Kozinski’s wife defended him on a website, posting the comment: "Alex is not into porn — he is into funny — and sometimes funny has a sexual character." His wife also called the Los Angeles Times expose of the materials "outright lies," a claim the editor denied in the article. An ethics panel is being convened to investigate the judge’s actions.

POWER BROKER
A State Administrative Judge hit the news with a billion-dollar decision yesterday, recommending that New York's Public Service Commission decline to approve a $4.5 billion takeover of a power company. According to the Times, the power company Iberdrola SA had hoped to purchase Energy East Corp, but Administrative Law Judge Rafael Epstein ruled that the merger would not meet state public interest standards. "The Commission should disapprove the transaction precisely because its lack of potential synergies or other benefits (when combined with the attendant risks) means that disapproval would avert a net detriment rather than forfeit an opportunity," he wrote. But the Commission will ultimately decide the fate of the merger.