Diane P. Wood

Diane P. Wood served as a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from June 1995 through April 2024, when she retired.

She was the Chief Judge of the Circuit from 2013-2020. Throughout this time and up to the present, she has also been a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Prior to her judicial appointment in 1995, she was the Green Professor of International Legal Studies at the University of Chicago Law School, where she also served as Associate Dean from 1989–1992. From 1993–1995, she was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. She clerked for Judge Irving L. Goldberg of the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Harry Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court.

Currently, she is the Director of the American Law Institute--the first woman in its 100-year history to hold that post--and serves on the Board of the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago, an organization devoted to teaching elementary and secondary school students about the U.S. legal system. From 2007 to 2013, she served as a member of the Judicial Conference’s Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure. Wood was to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and served as the Chair of the Council, an ex officio member of the Trust, and the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors.