Federal Judicial Service
Wood was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit by President Bill Clinton on March 31, 1995, to a seat vacated when William Joseph Bauer took senior status. She was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate and received her commission on June 30, 1995. Wood became the second woman ever to sit on the Seventh Circuit. On the bench, Wood is known for building consensus on the court and rallying other judges around her positions. Neil A. Lewis has called Wood an “unflinching and spirited intellectual counterweight" to the Seventh Circuit's well-known conservative heavyweights, Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook.
Wood is considered a likely candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court in an Obama Administration. Speculation that she might be appointed intensified after Justice David Souter's retirement announcement, and Wood was the first candidate interviewed for the post by President Barack Obama, who met with her at the White House while she was visiting from Chicago. When Justice John Paul Stevens announced that he would retire at the end of October Term 2010, Wood's name was again widely put forward as a likely replacement.
Read more about this topic: Diane Wood
Famous quotes containing the words federal, judicial and/or service:
“There are always those who are willing to surrender local self-government and turn over their affairs to some national authority in exchange for a payment of money out of the Federal Treasury. Whenever they find some abuse needs correction in their neighborhood, instead of applying the remedy themselves they seek to have a tribunal sent on from Washington to discharge their duties for them, regardless of the fact that in accepting such supervision they are bartering away their freedom.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Barnard’s greatest war service ... was the continuance of full-scale instruction in the liberal arts ... It was Barnard’s responsibility to keep alive in the minds of young people the great liberal tradition of the past and the study of philosophy, of history, of Greek.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)