Talk By Chief Judge Diane Wood

Diane Wood, Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, will be giving a lunch time talk—specifically on reform to the federal rules of civil procedure, but more broadly on her over two decades of experience on the bench. Chief Judge Wood is one of the most respected members of the federal judiciary and a perennial shortlist candidate for the Supreme Court. Beyond that, she is an engaging public speaker and truly insightful public intellectual. Before being nominated to the bench by President Clinton in 1995, Judge Wood was a tenured professor at the University of Chicago Law School. When she was hired, she was the only woman on faculty and the third woman in the school’s history. Outside of academia, Judge Wood clerked for Justice Blackmun, worked for the State Department OLA and Covington & Burling in DC, and served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in DOJ's Antitrust Division. Called a “rockstar of the written word,” Chief Judge Wood has written on everything from modes of constitutional interpretation to the role of a single judge on a multi-member court to abolishing the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction in patent law to what judges can learn from great literature.