Lee Rudofsky To Be Nominated For District Judgeship

Lee Rudofsky

President Donald Trump announced Monday his intent to nominate Lee Philip Rudofsky of Arkansas as judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

Rudofsky is senior director for global anti-corruption compliance at Walmart Inc. 

Before joining Walmart, he was the first solicitor general of Arkansas, representing the state in federal and state courts, including the United States Supreme Court, Arkansas Supreme Court and federal district courts. He also worked for Walmart before he was named solicitor general.

“When I hired Lee away from Walmart in 2015, I knew that he had the experience and legal acumen to be the lead strategist on crucial litigation for my administration as the first official solicitor general of the Attorney General’s Office,” Attorney General Rutledge said Monday. “I am confident that as a jurist Lee will be fair, impartial and will adhere to the rule of law.”

In the solicitor general role, Rudofsky advised Rutledge on several key proceedings, including defending the state’s decision to successfully terminate Medicaid program funding to Planned Parenthood.

Rutledge said in her statement that he organized a multistate, bipartisan and multimillion dollar lawsuit against the State of Delaware to the U.S. Supreme Court and successfully guided litigation allowing the execution of convicted murderers by lethal injection.

He is also credited with implementing her office’s formal moot court program to prepare office attorneys for argument and with establishing a clear review process of all briefs going to the 8th Circuit and Arkansas Supreme Court.

Earlier in his career, Rudofsky was in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, where he focused on constitutional, environmental and complex commercial matters. 

He was a law clerk to Judge Andrew Kleinfeld on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and to Justice Robert Cordy of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. 

Rudofsky earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, his M.P.A. from the Cornell Institute of Public Affairs and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.