Kimba Wood
Encyclopedia
Kimba Maureen Wood is a United States federal judge
United States federal judge
In the United States, the title of federal judge usually means a judge appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate in accordance with Article II of the United States Constitution....

 for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York is a federal district court. Appeals from the Southern District of New York are taken to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (in case...

.

Early life and education

Born in Port Townsend, Washington
Port Townsend, Washington
Port Townsend is a city in Jefferson County, Washington, United States, approximately north-northwest of Seattle . The population was 9,113 at the 2010 census an increase of 9.3% over the 2000 census. It is the county seat and only incorporated city of Jefferson County...

, her mother named Wood after seeing the small town of Kimba, South Australia
Kimba, South Australia
Kimba is a rural service town on the Eyre Highway at the top of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. At the 2006 census, Kimba had a population of 636 and it has an annual rainfall of 339 mm. There is 7 metre tall statue of a big galah beside the highway marking halfway between the east and west...

 in an atlas. Her father was a career officer and speechwriter in the United States Army
United States Army
The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...

. Wood frequently lived in Europe during her youth, where her father was stationed in several places, and she received early education at the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...

.

Wood received a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 from Connecticut College
Connecticut College
Connecticut College is a private liberal arts college located in New London, Connecticut.The college was founded in 1911, as Connecticut College for Women, in response to Wesleyan University closing its doors to women...

 in 1965. She received a M.Sc.
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

 from the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...

 in 1966. On a lark while in London, she spent five days training as a Playboy bunny
Playboy Bunny
A Playboy Bunny is a waitress at the Playboy Club. The Playboy Clubs were originally open from 1960 to 1988. The Club re-opened in one location in The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas in 2006...

.

She then earned a J.D.
Juris Doctor
Juris Doctor is a professional doctorate and first professional graduate degree in law.The degree was first awarded by Harvard University in the United States in the late 19th century and was created as a modern version of the old European doctor of law degree Juris Doctor (see etymology and...

 from Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...

 in 1969, where there were fewer than twenty women in her class.

Marriages

Wood was in private practice in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 from 1969 to 1970, and was then an attorney with the Office of Economic Opportunity
Office of Economic Opportunity
The Office of Economic Opportunity was the agency responsible for administering most of the War on Poverty programs created as part of United States President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society legislative agenda.- History :...

 from 1970 to 1971.

She relocated to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 and returned to private practice from 1971 to 1988, working as an anti-trust law expert at the firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & MacRae.
Her first marriage was to Robert (Bob) Lovejoy, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell
Davis Polk & Wardwell
Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP is an international law firm. The firm employs more than 800 attorneys worldwide and is headquartered in New York City. The firm represents many of the world's largest companies and leading financial institutions, and is best known for its corporate and litigation...

. She used the name Kimba Wood Lovejoy from 1970 to 1982, and then the couple divorced.

Wood married Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

magazine political columnist Michael Kramer in 1982. She retained her own name from that point forward. They had a son, Ben, in 1986, and were divorced some time later.

Wood is presently married to Wall Street financier and former Harvard Law School classmate Frank E. Richardson III, whom she wed in 1999. She had earlier been named as the "other woman" in a messy, public divorce battle in 1995 between Richardson and his socialite wife Nancy.

Judicial career

On December 18, 1987, based upon a recommendation from Senator Al D'Amato
Al D'Amato
Alfonse Marcello "Al" D'Amato is an American lawyer and former New York politician. A Republican, he served as United States Senator from New York from 1981 to 1999.-Early life and family:...

, Wood was nominated by President Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....

 to a seat on the District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by Constance Baker Motley
Constance Baker Motley
Constance Baker Motley was an African American civil rights activist, lawyer, judge, state senator, and President of Manhattan, New York City.-Early Life and Academics:...

. Wood was confirmed by a unanimous United States Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...

 on April 19, 1988, and received her commission on April 20, 1988. She entered on duty on July 28, 1988. She served as chief judge from 2006 to 2009 and assumed senior status
Senior status
Senior status is a form of semi-retirement for United States federal judges, and judges in some state court systems. After federal judges have reached a certain combination of age and years of service on the federal courts, they are allowed to assume senior status...

 on June 1, 2009.

One of Wood's most famous decisions was sentencing Michael Milken
Michael Milken
Michael Robert Milken is an American business magnate, financier, and philanthropist noted for his role in the development of the market for high-yield bonds during the 1970s and 1980s, for his 1990 guilty plea to felony charges for violating US securities laws, and for his funding of medical...

, known as "The Junk Bond
High-yield debt
In finance, a high-yield bond is a bond that is rated below investment grade...

 King", in 1990 to ten years in prison; the sentence was reduced to two years imprisonment and three years probation in 1991.

In the Nannygate
Nannygate
Nannygate was a 1993 political controversy in the United States wherein the nomination of Zoë Baird, and near-nomination of Kimba Wood, for U.S. Attorney General were withdrawn due to the hiring of illegal aliens as nannies or the failure to pay taxes for them...

 matter of 1993, Wood was Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

's second unsuccessful choice for United States Attorney General
United States Attorney General
The United States Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. The attorney general is considered to be the chief lawyer of the U.S. government...

. Like Clinton's previous nominee, Zoë Baird
Zoë Baird
Zoë Eliot Baird is an American lawyer who is president of the Markle Foundation. She is most known for her role in the Nannygate matter of 1993.-Biography:...

, Wood had hired an illegal alien
Illegal immigration
Illegal immigration is the migration into a nation in violation of the immigration laws of that jurisdiction. Illegal immigration raises many political, economical and social issues and has become a source of major controversy in developed countries and the more successful developing countries.In...

 as a nanny
Nanny
A nanny, childminder or child care provider, is an individual who provides care for one or more children in a family as a service...

; although, unlike Baird, she had paid the required taxes on the employee and had broken no laws. Wood employed the undocumented immigrant at a time when it was legal to do so, before enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986
Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986
The Immigration Reform and Control Act , , also Simpson-Mazzoli Act, is an Act of Congress which reformed United States immigration law.In brief the act:* required employers to attest to their employees' immigration status....

 made hiring of undocumented workers unlawful. The threat of a repetition of the same controversy quickly led to a withdrawal of Wood from consideration. Janet Reno
Janet Reno
Janet Wood Reno is a former Attorney General of the United States . She was nominated by President Bill Clinton on February 11, 1993, and confirmed on March 11...

 was later nominated and confirmed for the post.

In 1998, Wood presided over the case of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem
Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem
The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem is the head bishop of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, ranking fourth of nine Patriarchs in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Since 2005, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem has been Theophilos III...

 v. Christie's, Inc.
Christie's
Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...

, in which the ownership of the Archimedes Palimpsest
Archimedes Palimpsest
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a palimpsest on parchment in the form of a codex. It originally was a copy of an otherwise unknown work of the ancient mathematician, physicist, and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse and other authors, which was overwritten with a religious text.Archimedes lived in the...

 was disputed. Wood also later presided over Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc.
Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc.
Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc., 88 F. Supp. 2d 116, , aff'd 210 F.3d 88 , more widely known as the Pepsi Points Case, is a contracts case tried in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1999, in which the plaintiff, John Leonard, sued PepsiCo, Inc...

, 88 F. Supp 2d 116
Case citation
Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported...

 (S.D.N.Y. 1996), more widely known as the Pepsi Points
Pepsi Stuff
Pepsi Stuff was a major loyalty program launched by PepsiCo, first in North America on March 28, 1996 and then around the world, featuring premiums — such as T-shirts, hats, denim and leather jackets, bags and mountain bikes — that could be purchased with Pepsi Points through the Pepsi Stuff...

 Case
.

Wood has also served on the Amherst College
Amherst College
Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...

 Board of Trustees
Trustee
Trustee is a legal term which, in its broadest sense, can refer to any person who holds property, authority, or a position of trust or responsibility for the benefit of another...

, ending her term in 2001.

On July 8, 2010, Wood was the presiding judge over the US case against ten alleged Russian 'illegals
Non-official cover
Non-official cover is a term used in espionage, particularly by national intelligence services, for agents or operatives who assume covert roles in organizations without ties to the government for which they work. Such agents or operatives are typically abbreviated in espionage lingo as a NOC...

' involved in the Illegals program
Illegals Program
The Illegals Program, as it was called by the United States Department of Justice, was a network of Russian sleeper agents under non-official cover whose investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation culminated in the arrest of ten agents and a prisoner swap between Russia and the United...

. She accepted the defendants' guilty pleas, sentenced all ten to time served, and all ten were then deported and exchanged for four prisoners previously held in Russia. On October 26 of that year, Wood issued an injunction in Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC
Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC
Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, 715 F. Supp. 2d 481 , is a United States district court case in which the Southern District of New York held that Lime Group LLC, the defendant, induced copyright infringement with its peer-to-peer file sharing software, LimeWire. The court issued a permanent...

 forcing LimeWire
LimeWire
LimeWire is a free peer-to-peer file sharing client program that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems supported by the Java software platform. LimeWire uses the gnutella network as well as the BitTorrent protocol. A free software version and a purchasable "enhanced"...

 to prevent "the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality" of its software. A trial investigating the damages necessary to compensate the affected record labels is scheduled to begin in January 2011.

On November 19, 2010, Judge Wood received media attention via The Atlantic online magazine regarding a letter from Bennet M. Epstein, an attorney who asked for time off to attend his grandson's bris, if indeed the baby is a boy. In a response to Epstein, Judge Wood wrote that Epstein would be permitted to attend the bris, but that "if a daughter is born, there will be a public celebration in court, with readings from poetry celebrating girls and women."

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK