Judge Rudofsky Will Be An Excellent Addition To the Eighth Circuit

I was extremely pleased to see that President Trump nominated Judge Lee Rudofsky of the Eastern District of Arkansas to a new vacancy on the Eighth Circuit. I have known Judge Rudofsky since his service as Arkansas Solicitor General nearly a decade ago. Judge Rudofsky is a committed originalist and a careful jurist. I echo the Wall Street Journal’s strong editorial in support of Judge Rudofsky:

Over the past seven years, Judge Rudofsky has earned a reputation as a cerebral jurist willing to reconsider legal disputes from an originalist perspective. In 2022 he ruled that private parties can’t sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was meant to be enforced by the government (Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment). The left treated his reading of the law as sacrilege, but it was upheld on appeal.

This summer Judge Rudofsky dismissed the equal protection claim from a lawsuit challenging Arkansas’s ban on critical-race theory in public schools (Walls v. Sanders). “A desire to protect students from ‘left-wing indoctrination’ is not tantamount to a discriminatory intent or purpose to adversely impact African American students,” the judge wrote. “End of story.”

I also appreciate President Trump’s trend of elevating district court judges that he appointed to the court of appeals. Perhaps the best predictor of how a circuit judge will perform is past practice. Recently my friend Rob Luther flagged a number of Trump’s district court picks from the past two years who should be on the short-list for any vacancy:

Let’s review some of Warrington’s best, young, District Court nominees/judges in: 1) Missouri (Divine, Benton, Bluestone, Lanahan); 2) Texas (Ganjei, Davis, Mitchell, Colmenero); 3) North Carolina (Orso, Rodriguez, Freeman, Bragdon); 4) Alabama (LaCour); 5) Kentucky (Meredith); 6) Montana (Smithgall Lane); 7) Kansas (Kuhlman); 8) Louisiana (St. John — already elevated to the Fifth Circuit) and 9) Tennessee (Lea — and —today — Adkisson — one of Warrington’s most active and trusted deputies).

Notably, no Court of Appeals seats are anticipated to open in most of these states anytime soon. In other words, many of these recently-minted District Judges are presumptively a blueprint of the next Republican President’s Court of Appeals judges.

These nominations are among David Warrington’s most important contributions. And I fully expect White House Counsel Will Scharf (who I’ve known since law school) to keep the momentum forward on nominations.