The Conciliator: Meet the second coming of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Diane Wood)

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In March, 2008, Martha Nussbaum, a law professor at the University of Chicago, traveled with Judge Diane Wood to a conference in India. The topic was affirmative action in higher education, and before the conference began, they went to Kolkata to meet women leaders who were gathered to talk about how women should claim their legal rights. "Diane borrowed half of my Indian wardrobe and came in like an Indian woman," Nussbaum recalls. "She talked to the group about how she works to give information to women and girls in the Chicago schools about their legal rights, and she was able to engage these people without any condescension. It was amazing to me how she got along with people of all social backgrounds--Muslims, Hindus, upper and lower caste."

Wood's ability to get along with people with different points of view has characterized her work at the University of Chicago and on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, where she has won the respect of liberal as well as conservative colleagues since her appointment in 1995. "She has an ideal judicial temperament," says Richard Epstein, a libertarian scholar at the University of Chicago. "She has the obvious admiration of her colleagues, her clerks, and the lawyers who practice before her. Indeed I have never heard anyone ever utter a word of her performance since she has been on the bench. She is open to argument on all questions, and the lawyers who appear before her know that they will get a respectful hearing. She is theoretically rigorous but nondogmatic. I think that her nomination should be greeted with acclamation by Democrats and Republicans alike." Wood has also, according to Nussbaum, won the respect of her conservative judicial colleagues, Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook. (Click here to see who's on Obama's Supreme Court shortlist.)

Born in New Jersey (her father was an accountant for Exxon), Wood attended the University of Texas Law School, where her professor and future University of Chicago colleague Albert Alschuler recalls that, as a first year student in 1973, the year Roe v. Wade was decided, she took a "strong pro Roe position" in class, defending the decision against student critics. "I called on her every day for a week," says Alschuler, and "the reason I did was she was so good in defending Roe" against counter-arguments raised by classmates. After graduation, Wood went on to clerk for Judge Irving Goldberg and Justice Harry Blackmun and, from 1981 to 1995, she taught at the University of Chicago, a tenure that was interspersed with two stints at the Justice Department, including one as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division. President Clinton nominated Wood to the bench in 1995.

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