Gov. Phil Murphy is expected to announce on Monday that he will nominate John Jay Hoffman, a former acting attorney general of New Jersey and the general counsel of Rutgers University for the last eight years, to serve as an associate justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, the New Jersey Globe has confirmed.
If confirmed by the New Jersey State Senate, Hoffman would succeed Justice Lee A. Solomon, who reaches the mandatory retirement age of 70 on August 17 after spending ten years on the state’s top court. The 58-year-old Hoffman could serve eleven years on the state’s highest court.
Hoffman was serving as executive assistant attorney general in June 2013 when Gov. Chris Christie appointed Attorney General Jeff Chiesa to the U.S. Senate following the death of Frank R. Lautenberg.
In turn, Christie named Hoffman acting attorney general in what was supposed to be a short-term job. Later that year, Christie announced his intention to nominate his chief of staff, Kevin O’Dowd, as attorney general. But the Bridgegate scandal put O’Dowd on hold—Christie never formally nominated him—and he left the state government one year later.
As a result, Hoffman remained as acting attorney general for nearly three years, until departing in March 2016 to become vice president and general counsel at Rutgers.
Aside from a stint at a top Washington law firm, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, Hoffman has spent most of his career in the public sector. He was a trial lawyer for the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice for seven years, and while Christie was the state’s federal prosecutor, Hoffman served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, prosecuting economic and white-collar crimes.
He spent about two years as the director of investigations at the New Jersey State Comptroller’s Office before Chiesa named him to his leadership team in 2012.
As acting attorney general, Hoffman launched an initiative to provide police officers with Narcan, an opiate antidote, and pushed for a prescription monitoring program. He pushed to increase the number of body-worn cameras by police officers.
Hoffman, an unaffiliated voter, will be taking a Republican seat. That follows a precedent set by GOP Gov. Christine Todd Whitman in 1999 when she nominated Jaynee LaVecchia, who never joined a political party, to replace a retiring Justice Marie Garibaldi, a Republican. LaVecchia had served as deputy chief counsel to Gov. Tom Kean and in Whitman’s cabinet and was deemed Republican enough to qualify for the seat.
The New Jersey Globe has confirmed that Murphy had considered more than a dozen candidates for associate justice and interviewed five: Morris County Assignment Judge Stuart Minkowitz; Hudson County Civil Presiding Judge Joseph A. Turula; Roshan D. Shah, a trial lawyer from Monmouth County; Sherilyn Pastor, the chair of the Insurance Recovery, Litigation and Counseling practice at McCarter English; and Hoffman.
Turula would have become the state’s first openly gay Supreme Court Justice, and Shah would have been the first Asian American on the top court.
Minkowitz, the most conservative of the group, might have garnered support from Senate Republicans, but personal positions on abortion, guns, and his treatment of people of color might have caused problems for Murphy among Democratic senators. There are also unanswered questions regarding Minkowitz’s role in a sealed change of venue order connected to the prosecution of three former elected officials where disgraced Morristown tax appeal attorney Matt O’Donnell is the state’s cooperating witness.
The New Jersey Globe confirmed that three Superior Court judges were also under active consideration for Solomon’s seat: Robert A. Ballard, Jr., the civil presiding judge in Somerset-Hunterdon-Warren vicinage; Tariq Chaudri, a family court judge in Cumberland County; and Gavin Handwerker, a family court judge in Union County.
Appellate Court Judge Maritza Berdote Byrne and Union County Assignment Judge Lisa Miralles Walsh, both Latina Republicans, had been vetted for the GOP seat that went to Fasciale in 2022, were also considered again this year.
Hoffman will be Murphy’s fifth pick for the New Jersey Supreme Court; he named Fabiana Pierre-Louis in 2020, Rachel Wainer Apter in 2021, Douglas Fasciale in 2022, and Michael Noriega in 2023.
A resident of Burlington County, Hoffman would need to win signoff from state senators from both parties, Troy Singleton (D-Delran) and Latham Tiver (R-Southampton), under the unwritten rule of senatorial courtesy before he could seek the approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then the full Senate.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Brian P. Stack told the New Jersey Globe that he would back Hoffman.
“John Hoffman will make an excellent Supreme Court Justice and I look forward to his confirmation hearing and supporting him,” Stack said.
He will also need to win approval from the New Jersey State Bar Association Judicial and Prosecutorial Appointments Committee (JPAC).
Hoffman will likely face questions from senators about investigations into police shootings by the attorney general’s office on his watch, the settlement of an $8.9 billion settlement of the state’s environmental lawsuit against Exon for $225 million, and the Christie administration’s legal battles in opposition to gay marriage and with labor unions over unfunded pensions. He’ll also likely face questions about events at Rutgers while he was their top lawyer, including union disputes, the college’s refusal to cancel controversial speakers, and the recent handling of a pro-Palestinian encampment at the New Brunswick campus.
Senators from both parties might see another potential red flag: Hoffman contributed $3,300 to Christie’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. In 2020, he donated $100 to a hybrid PAC aimed at helping Republican candidates, including Donald Trump, on the ballot in Virginia.
Hoffman also sent a total of $2,500 to Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield) for his 2017 Assembly race and his campaigns for State Senate in 2021 and 2023. Bramnick is a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor next year.
If he joins the seven-member Supreme Court, Hoffman would be one of six justices without prior judicial service; Fasciale had been a Superior Court judge for eighteen years.
Hoffman is the son of John A. Hoffman, a former chairman at Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer, once among the most politically influential law firms in the state and a major donor to Democrats. His father-in-law, Stuart Cox, Jr., had been John A. Hoffman’s law partner at Wilentz.
He graduated from Colgate University and received his law degree from Duke. He served as a clerk to Albert J. Engel, Jr., a judge of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
His wife, Mary Jude Cox, is an ophthalmologist and a glaucoma specialist at the Willis Eye Hospital in Philadelphia.
This is expected to be the last Supreme Court nomination for Murphy, who is term-limited and will leave office in January 2026. Barring unexpected departures, the next seat up will be a Republican, Anne Patterson, who turns 70 in April 2029. She’ll be replaced by the winner of the 2025 gubernatorial election, and not until his or her fourth year in office.
The victor of the 2029 governor’s race will immediately get two Supreme Court picks: Stuart Rabner, the longest-serving chief justice in New Jersey history, turns 70 in June 2030, and Fasciale reaches the mandatory retirement age in November 2030.
This story was updated at 4:50 PM with comment from Stack.