[2] She lived in nearby Westfield, New Jersey, where her father was an accountant at Exxon, and her mother worked for the Washington Rock Girl Scout Council.

Wood earned her Juris Doctor from the University of Texas School of Law in 1975, graduating with high honors and Order of the Coif.

From 1993 to 1995, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for international, appellate, and policy in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.

While still a full-time law school professor (before joining the Department of Justice and the Court of Appeals), she was a member of Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women.

[9][10] In January 2021, the University of Chicago Law School, where Wood teaches as a senior lecturer, announced that it would honor Wood for her 25th anniversary on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit with a special edition of essays published by her colleagues in the University of Chicago Law Review.

[11] On March 31, 1995, President Bill Clinton nominated Wood to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit after William J. Bauer assumed senior status.

[13] 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.

[16][17] Speculation that she might be appointed intensified after Justice David Souter's retirement announcement,[14][18] and Wood was the first candidate Obama interviewed for the post, meeting with her at the White House while she was visiting from Chicago.

[19] When Justice John Paul Stevens announced that he would retire at the end of October 2009 term, Wood's name was again widely put forward as a likely replacement.

[20][21][22] If, in the end, the facts show that [the university's] nondiscrimination policy does not apply to student organizations, or that SIU is discriminating against CLS based upon its evangelical Christian viewpoint, the district court should certainly enjoin SIU from enforcing its policy.She cited Lawrence v. Texas to support the proposition that a state may ban discrimination based on either status or conduct.

[26] Judge Wood stated in her dissenting opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Walker that the record was insufficient to grant injunctive relief.

On June 25, 2018, Wood wrote a concurrence in the denial of en banc after the Seventh Circuit blocked Indiana's fetal burial requirement and ban on disability-based abortion.

Some representative works include: Wood is married to Robert L. Sufit, a professor of neurology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, to whom she was introduced by her fellow Seventh Circuit Judge Ilana Rovner.