Bennett Rushkoff

Bennett Rushkoff has served as an Administrative Law Judge for the District of Columbia Office of Administrative Hearings since July 25, 2016. He was reappointed to a six-year term in July 2018. From January 2019 to January 2023, he served as the Principal Administrative Law Judge for Public Benefits cases.

Prior to becoming an Administrative Law Judge, he was an attorney-manager for 17 years at the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia. There, he served as Chief of the Consumer and Trade Protection Section and, later, as Chief of the Public Advocacy Section. In both these positions, he directed the Office’s work involving consumer protection, antitrust, nonprofit oversight, the Public Service Commission, and the multistate tobacco settlement.

In 2011, he led the Office of the Attorney General’s successful investigation and civil prosecution of a sitting member of the DC Council, who was accused of diverting – for his own benefit – government funds intended for youth baseball programs.

Before joining the Office of the Attorney General in December 1998, he worked as a Special Assistant to the Maryland Attorney General, as a Special Chief Counsel to the Missouri Attorney General, as a staff attorney at the Federal Trade Commission, and as an associate in the DC office of the law firm Sutherland, Asbill and Brennan.

While at the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, he won a summary judgment in a nonprofit oversight case against the Blue Cross company serving eastern Missouri. That victory led to the creation in February 2000 of the Missouri Foundation for Health, a charitable foundation that awards annually about $45 million in grants to promote health care.

He has taught as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and has served as Steering Committee Chair for the DC Bar’s Antitrust and Consumer Law Section. He currently serves on the steering committee for the DC Bar’s Public Interest and Courts Community.

He is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B. 1980 cum laude), where he majored in public policy, and the Yale Law School (J.D. 1983), where he served as an Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, he clerked for The Hon. Albert J. Engel of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.