Ex-Houstonian on short list again for high court
STEWART M. POWELL and KATIE BRANDENBURG WASHINGTON BUREAU
April 9, 2010, 11:28PMWASHINGTON — She was the new kid in class at Houston's Westchester High School in the mid-1960s, a brainy teenager from northern New Jersey who quickly made her mark as a distinguished twirler and class valedictorian.
Now Judge Diane Wood, 59, a distinguished graduate of the University of Texas and University of Texas law school on the federal appeals court in Chicago, is on President Barack Obama's short list for a second time to fill a Supreme Court vacancy — this time to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. ....
Wood raced through college in three years before entering law school, where she served as an editor of the Texas Law Review and won admission to the Order of the Coif, an honorary scholastic society that fosters “a spirit of careful study.”....
Wood was a clerk for Judge Irving Goldberg on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, before winning a prestigious clerkship on the Supreme Court, with Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. ....
Wood arrived at the high court as a clerk a year after Stevens had taken his seat.
Wood subsequently worked for the State Department and the blue-blood Washington, D.C., law firm Covington & Burling before joining the law faculty at the University of Chicago for 14 years, which included stints at the Justice Department.
President Bill Clinton named Wood to the federal bench in 1995 but it was crossing paths with a young constitutional law professor at University of Chicago — Barack Obama — that may help Wood's chances....
Wood's appeals court experience tangling with powerhouse conservative Judges Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook shows she has the mettle to square off with the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, her allies say.
“It isn't that she tamed her opponents; it's that she has worked constructively side-by-side with them and managed to establish her niche,” Sager said.
Some conservatives have labeled Wood a judicial liberal and activist, especially on the hot-button issue of abortion. Wood wrote the opinion ruling that racketeering laws could be used against abortion protest groups, a ruling subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court in an 8-1 ruling.
Wood also dissented from her appeals court's conservative majority on banning a controversial late-term abortion procedure critics call partial-birth abortion. ....
end snips
Diane or Ronnie? You be the judge ...
