Her Ladyship Georgina Theodora Wood is the Chief Justice of the Republic of Ghana. She is the first woman in Ghana to be elevated to this high office as a result of her appointment in June of 2007. In Ghana, the Chief Justice position is constitutionally the fourth position after the President, Vice President, and the Speaker of Parliament. She has had a distinguished career on the Bench spanning over thirty-five years.
Justice Georgina Wood was educated at the University of Ghana, Legon and the Ghana School of Law and served for three years in the Police Service as a Public Prosecutor.
She was appointed to the Bench as a Magistrate of the District Court in 1973 and rose through the hierarchy of the court system culminating in her appointment to the highest judicial office in Ghana.
Between 2003 and 2007, she served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Gambia when in session. She is also a dedicated advocate of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), having received extensive training from the USA, and a distance learning modular program from the World Bank. She was a member of the task force which designed the Ghana Court-connected ADR program and was the Chairperson of the working committee which drafted the manuals on Court connected ADR and pre-trials in the Commercial Court of Ghana. She also chaired the committee responsible for mainstreaming ADR in the courts in Ghana.
She has also lectured extensively in ADR (theory and practice) at the Judicial Training Institute, training key personnel including judges, lawyers and civil society organizations. She taught Civil Procedure and ADR in the Judicial Service Career Magistrates Program, and was an external examiner in advocacy and ethics, Ghana School of Law for more than 10 years.
Justice Wood also co-authored the practice manual on the Gambian ADR court- connected program and has also been a Judicial educator in ADR for the Bench, the Bar and court officials in the Gambia.
In 2007, she received Ghana's highest National Award, the Order of the Star of Ghana for meritorious public service and in August 2008 was given an LLD (Honoris Causa) from the University of Ghana. She has also received an award from the Faculty of Law, University of Ghana for outstanding Judicial Career.
In April of 2008, Her Ladyship Georgina Theodora Wood was invited by Fordham Law School in New York, where she delivered a paper on the topic The Dynamic of Law and Development in Ghana; The case for Judicial Reform in an Emergent Democracy. She was the keynote speaker for the 16th Commonwealth Law Conference (CLC2009) in Hong Kong, where she spoke on the topic Democracy, Good Governance and the role of the Legal Profession: The case of Ghana in April 2009.
In 2010 she gave a Lecture on Ghanaian Women and Children’s access to Justice at the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice, Cornell University.
In September last year, Chief Justice Wood was appointed a member of the special team of the International Bar Association (IBA) and International Legal Assistance Consortium (ILAC) to Kenya at the invitation of the Kenya Law Society on Judicial Reforms.