Abby Wood

Abby Wood is the George T. and Harriet E. Pfleger Chair in Law and Professor of Law, Political Science, and Public Policy at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law.  She is a scholar of law and politics, examining the relationship between laws and human behavior. She is currently studying how campaign finance laws and ethics laws shape public officials’ decision-making and voters’ political trust. 

Wood teaches administrative law, campaign finance, and analytical methods for lawyers. She has taught on a variety of subjects, including international human rights law, constitutional law, quantitative methods for political science and comparative politics. In addition to teaching at USC, Wood has taught at the University of Chicago Law School.

Wood also serves the public. She has served as a Commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission, and as a member of the Commission’s Digital Transparency Task Force. From 2015 to 2017, she served on the U.S. Federal Bipartisan Campaign Finance Task Force. Before joining USC Gould, Wood clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan, judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She also has consulted on good governance projects for international organizations.

Wood holds a BA from Austin College, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.