President Trump made a tremendous pick to the Eighth Circuit in Judge Lee Rudofsky. The Eighth Circuit is on the verge of being made truly great following the strong appointment of Judges Traynor, Smith, Kobes, Stras, and Grasz. Lee will cement a strong constitutionalist majority in that vast court.
I’ve been friends with Lee since I was a baby lawyer and he was the senior associate on our Deepwater Horizon trial team at Kirkland & Ellis. (The other associate was Judge Katie Crytzer of the Eastern District of Tennessee.) Lee had just returned to the firm after having been deputy general counsel for the Romney 2012 campaign. Our mutual colleague, Jeff Clark (he of the later Trump-administration service), told Lee that he and I had a similar view of the law and that Lee should show me the ropes. He did, and we’ve been friends ever since.
Lee has the standard profile for a Trump appellate judge. He went to Cornell and the Harvard Law School. He clerked for the great Judge Kleinfeld on the Ninth Circuit. He has a wide variety of consequential legal experience — Kirkland & Ellis, the Romney campaign, Walmart, and service as solicitor general of Arkansas. Since the first Trump administration, he has been a judge on the Eastern District of Arkansas in Little Rock.
While ambulance chasers like to say that past performance isn’t indicative of future results, it’s important when it comes to judicial nominations. Lee’s performance has been tremendous.
To pick a few cases, in Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, Lee held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not provide an implied private right of action, delivering a body blow to the Elias Industrial Complex. (He was upheld on appeal.) In EEOC v. Kroger he let a case move to trial in which two Christian employees were fired for refusing to wear pro-gay aprons. Just recently, in Walls v. Sanders, Lee dismissed an Equal Protection challenge to Arkansas’s law banning critical race theory in schools.
Lee has also used his position to advance legal conservatism more broadly in younger generations. A problem in contemporary legal practice is that it can be hard for young lawyers to get time standing up in court. Some judges remedy this by saying that they’ll give argument time for motions if they’re authored and filed by junior attorneys. Some judges have problematically gone further than this by encouraging preferential argument time for women and minorities. Lee, on the other hand, has used his docket control to encourage originalist analysis, promising argument time for young lawyers who file amicus briefs that raise “important historical context, in-depth corpus linguistics analyses, or detailed structural arguments that might not make it into the parties’ briefing.”
Between Lee’s credentials, his career, his record on the bench, and his support for the conservative legal movement, he’s a tremendous pick for the Eighth Circuit. The president and the Arkansas senators are to be commended for it and he should be confirmed expeditiously.