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Hon. Diane Wood to Deliver Annual Tucker Lecture

The Hon. Diane P. Wood, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit will deliver the 2015-16 Tucker Lecture at Washington and Lee University School of Law.

The lecture will take place Monday, Oct 19 at 2:00 p.m. in the Millhiser Moot Court Room, Sydney Lewis Hall on the campus of Washington and Lee. The title Chief Judge Wood’s talk is “The Quiet Crisis in Access to Justice.” This event is free and open to the public.

In addition to her position with the Seventh Circuit, Chief Judge Wood is a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School. She attended the University of Texas at Austin, earning her B.A. in 1971 and her J.D. in 1975. After graduation from law school, she clerked for Judge Irving L. Goldberg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. She then spent a brief period at the Office of the Legal Adviser in the U.S. Department of State.

In 1980, Chief Judge Wood began her career as a legal academic at Georgetown University Law Center. She moved to the University of Chicago Law School in 1981, serving as a full-time professor until 1995 and as associate dean from 1989 through 1992. In 1990, she was named to the Harold J. and Marion F. Green Professorship in International Legal Studies, becoming the first woman to hold a named chair at the school.

From 1993 until she was appointed to the Seventh Circuit in 1995, Chief Judge Wood served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Chief Judge Wood is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is on the Council of the American Law Institute.

The Tucker Lecture at Washington and Lee School of Law was first established by the W&L Board of Trustees in 1949 to mark the bicentennial of the University and the centennial of the Law School. It was named after John Randolph Tucker, hired in 1870 as the second teacher in legal education and named the first dean of the Washington and Law University School of Law in 1893.