The Honorable Diane P. Wood

The Honorable Diane P. Wood, a circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, will deliver the keynote address at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law’s fourth annual U.S. Supreme Court Intellectual Property Review (SCIPR) on Thursday, September 26. The one-day conference will be held at the law school. Wood will address the topic “Is It Time to Abolish the Federal Circuit’s Exclusive Jurisdiction in Patent Cases?”

IIT Chicago-Kent’s U.S. Supreme Court IP Review is the only conference in the country focused exclusively on intellectual property cases before the Supreme Court. The annual program draws leading members of the U.S. Supreme Court bar, intellectual property practice, academia and the judiciary. Presenters include many of the nation’s top intellectual property scholars and Supreme Court litigators.

Participants in this year’s conference will review six intellectual property cases decided in the 2012–13 U.S. Supreme Court term and examine cases on the docket for the next session.

Wood received both her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. After graduation from law school, she clerked for Judge Irving L. Goldberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. Following her clerkships, she worked briefly for the U.S. State Department on international investment, antitrust and transfer of technology issues.

Wood briefly worked in private practice in Washington, D.C. Moving from private practice into academia in the 1980s and early 1990s, she served on the faculties of the Georgetown University Law Center, Cornell Law School, the University of San Diego Institute of International & Comparative Law and the University of Chicago.

In 1986, she worked on the project to revise the Department of Justice Antitrust Guide for International Operations. From 1993 until 1995, she was deputy assistant general in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, with responsibility for the division’s international, appellate and legal policy matters.

Before her appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 1995, Wood was the Harold J. and Marion F. Green Professor of International Legal Studies at the University of Chicago Law School, where she currently serves as a senior lecturer. Her scholarship focuses on antitrust, federal civil procedure and international trade and business.

General registration for the conference is $35, $15 for non–IIT Chicago-Kent academics and students, and free to IIT Chicago-Kent faculty and students. For more information or to register, please contact Patricia O’Neal at 312.906.5128 or ipconference@kentlaw.edu or visit the website.