The ACS is delighted to welcome the Honorable Diane P. Wood, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Judge Wood received both her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. After graduation from law school, she clerked for Judge Irving L. Goldberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. Following her clerkships, she worked briefly for the U.S. State Department on international investment, antitrust, and transfer of technology issues.

She briefly worked in private practice with the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling. There, her principal work was in the areas of trial and appellate antitrust litigation, antitrust counseling, general litigation, and international law. Moving from private practice into academia in the 1980s and early 1990s, Judge Wood served on the faculties of the Georgetown University Law Center, Cornell Law School, the University of San Diego Institute of International & Comparative Law, and the University of Chicago.

Before her appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 1995, Judge Wood was the Harold J. and Marion F. Green Professor of International Legal Studies at the University of Chicago Law School, where she currently serves as a senior lecturer. Her scholarship focuses on antitrust, federal civil procedure, and international trade and business.

Between 1989 and 1990, Judge Wood was a member of the senior advisory group of the Brookings Institution's Civil Justice Project, which conducted a detailed study of the problems of cost and delay in the federal civil justice system, and recommended legislation that led to the enactment of the Civil Justice Reform Act of 1990.