[2] She had been recommended to Carter by Senators Henry M. Jackson and Warren Magnuson, who had "decided to use a merit commission to select the appointment rather than the usual method of selecting through the political process".

[1] She was confirmed by the United States Senate on February 20, 1980, and received her commission the same day.

[2] In February 2020, Rothstein, sitting by designation with the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Florida, was a member of a 3-judge panel in Jones et al. v. DeSantis, a 2020 voting rights case.

2018 Florida Amendment 4 permitted former felons to vote, however DeSantis signed a law that required former felons to pay all legal fees before being eligible to vote again, despite some of them not knowing how much they owed.

However, the panel was reversed in a sharply divided en banc decision that September.