Jennifer Mnookin

Jennifer L. Mnookin is the Dean of UCLA School of Law. She is also the David G. Price and Dallas P. Price Professor of Law and the founding co-director of UCLA Law's Program on Understanding Law, Science and Evidence (PULSE@UCLA Law). She is an expert on evidence law, and has co-authored books, written articles and published op-eds on the subjects of expert and scientific evidence. On June 4, 2015, Mnookin was named the ninth dean in the history of UCLA School of Law. On April 23, 2020, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mnookin was born in 1967 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the daughter of Robert Mnookin, the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School,and Dale Mnookin. She grew up in Berkeley and Palo Alto, California, and attended Harvard College, where she earned her A.B. in 1988 and was an editor for The Harvard Crimson. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995 and holds a Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science and Technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mnookin joined the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Law in 1998. In 2002-03 she was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. She joined the faculty of UCLA School of Law in 2005. Mnookin served as Vice Dean for Faculty and Research (2007–09) and as Vice Dean for External Appointments and Intellectual Life (2012–13) before being named dean.

Her scholarship focuses on the interconnections between evidence, science and technology, and legal and cultural ideas about proof and persuasion. She has written on topics ranging from the history of photographic evidence to the complexities of the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment with respect to expert evidence. She is a co-author of The New Wigmore, A Treatise on Evidence: Expert Evidence, and Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony. Much of her work has focused on the problems of forensic science evidence, especially pattern identification evidence like latent fingerprint identification. She has frequently commented to the press on forensic science and evidence issues and has occasionally consulted or served as an expert witness on the scientific foundation of fingerprint evidence.

Her scholarship on forensic science was cited extensively by the National Academy of Sciences' 2009 report. She is a former member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Science, Technology and the Law and is on the advisory board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. She was the primary investigator for a National Institute of Justice project that sought to develop objective metrics for measuring the difficulty of fingerprint comparisons. Her work on the Confrontation Clause was cited and discussed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Williams v. Illinois (2012). In 2016, she co-chaired an advisory group to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which issued a report on the reliability of forensic science used in the courtroom.

In her role as a law school administrator, Mnookin is a former member of the steering committee of the Association of American Law Schools' Dean's Forum. Mnookin was named a member of the American Law Institute, a leading organization dedicated to improving and modernizing the law, in 2011.

Mnookin is married to Joshua Foa Dienstag, a professor of political science and law at UCLA. They have two children, Sophia and Isaac.