Before joining the faculty at Yale, Rodríguez was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel within the United States Department of Justice.
Rodríguez then travelled to England where she became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford while earning her Master of Letters in Modern History.
[4] Upon graduating from Yale, Rodríguez became a Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School during the 2001–02 academic year.
[7] From 2011 until 2013, Rodríguez was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel within the United States Department of Justice.
In January 2013, Rodríguez left her position as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General to become Yale Law School's first tenured Latino faculty member.