Lee Rudofsky

On August 12, 2026, President Trump nominated Lee Rudofsky to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. 

Biography 

Rudofsky received a B.S. and a M.P.A. from Cornell University in 2001 and 2002, respectively. He received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2005.

Legal Experience

After law school, Rudofsky clerked for Justice Robert J. Cordy of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and Judge Andrew Kleinfeld of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Following his clerkships, he became an associate at Kirkland & Ellis before serving as Deputy General Counsel to the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign.

In 2015, Rudofsky became Solicitor General of Arkansas. He left that role in 2018 to become Senior Director for global anti-corruption compliance at Walmart.

On July 1, 2019, President Trump nominated Rudofsky to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. His nomination was confirmed by a 51-41 Senate vote on November 7, 2019, and Rudofsky received his judicial commission on November 8, 2019. He has been serving as a federal district court judge since 2019.

Key Facts and Context 

• In 2022, Rudofsky held that private American citizens could not bring lawsuits under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Instead, Section 2 violations could only be enforced by the Attorney General of the United States, contrary to decades of Supreme Court precedent that allowed for private enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Curbing the standing in this manner further gutted the VRA and rendered it largely unenforceable.

• Rudofsky also issued an opinion that cut off accountability for an Arkansas inmate’s allegation of sexual assault. His opinion noted that the inmate could not state a claim for sexual assault because she did not sufficiently allege that the sexual assault was nonconsensual. As noted by the dissent, the complaint was handwritten by a party without an attorney.