Jay Lefkowitz (born 20 November 1962) is an American lawyer. He is a senior partner at the Kirkland & Ellis law firm, and he also served as President George W. Bush's Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea.
Career
Lefkowitz is a graduate of Columbia University and Columbia Law School. Earlier in the George W. Bush administration, Lefkowitz was general counsel in the Office of Management and Budget and later deputy director of domestic policy at the White House. He crafted Bush's policy on stem cell research. After leaving the White House in 2003, he was twice offered West Wing jobs.
Lefkowitz also serves as a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, in which capacity he teaches a seminar on the Supreme Court. This seminar uses a simulation method whereby students act in the roles of Supreme Court justices hearing cases and writing opinions in cases currently pending before the Court.
Lefkowitz was also director of cabinet affairs and deputy executive secretary to the Domestic Policy Council for President George H. W. Bush. Near the end of the Cold War, Lefkowitz was active in the movement to allow Soviet Jews or "Refuseniks" to emigrate from the Soviet Union.
Government service
Lefkowitz is credited as, while serving as general counsel in the White House's Office of Management and Budget, having been the architect of President George W. Bush's decision to allow federal money to pay for some amount of research on stem cells from human embryos.
North Korea
As envoy for North Korean human rights, Lefkowitz referred to the North Korean government as a "deeply oppressive nation". He criticized the creation of the Kaesong Industrial Region as exploitative, since it failed to bring true economic reform to North Korea and allowed South Korean corporations to pay North Korean workers as little as $2 a day.
Notable litigation
In two major cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, Pliva Inc. v. Mensing, (564 U.S. 604 (2011) and Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett, 570 U.S. 472 (2013), Lefkowitz succeeded in persuading the Supreme Court that because federal law absolutely demands that generic drugs precisely follow the FDA-approved labels of the related brand-name drug produced by another manufacturer, states may not impose liability on generic manufacturers who do nothing but use the labels federal law requires them to use.
In 2007/2008, in the course of serving as a criminal defense lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein, eventually convicted of sex offences, Lefkowitz negotiated a deal with prosecutor Alexander Acosta. Acosta would later come under attack for having made this agreement with Epstein's defense lawyers, and pressure connected with whether the deal was in the best interest of the prosecution led Acosta to resign his position as Secretary of Labor in 2019.
In Corber v. Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals Inc., the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled in favor of Lefkowitz's client, Teva Pharmaceuticals. Hundreds of plaintiffs had brought actions against Teva in various California state courts and had asked that the cases be coordinated before one state court judge "for all purposes." The defendants sought to remove the cases to federal court pursuant to the Class Action Fairness Act ("CAFA"), on the ground that the plaintiffs had proposed a joint trial. But the District Court and a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit held that the cases were not removable because the plaintiffs had not explicitly asked that the cases be tried together, which is essential to the definition of a removable "mass action" under CAFA. The Ninth Circuit granted en banc review and ruled in favor of Lefkowitz's client, that the plaintiffs' request for coordination "for all purposes" necessarily encompassed a request for a joint trial. Hence, the case was properly removed to federal court.
In Association for Accessible Medicines v. Frosh, Lefkowitz secured a major victory on behalf of his client in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. During its 2017 legislative session, the Maryland General Assembly had passed a law prohibiting a manufacturer or wholesale distributor from "engag[ing] in price gouging in the sale of an essential off-patent or generic drug." Md. Code Ann. Health Genera; § 2-802(a). The Court ruled that the statute violated the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution because a state may not regulate transactions that occur completely out of that state. In the case of the Maryland statute, the state statute was impermissibly regulating transactions between manufacturers and distributors that took place wholly outside of Maryland.