Jennifer L. Mnookin

Biography

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Jennifer Mnookin Professor of Law A.B. Harvard, 1988 J.D. Yale, 1995 Ph.D. History and Social Study of Science and Technology, M.I.T., 1999 mnookin@law.ucla.edu

Jennifer Mnookin is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law.  From 2007-2009, she served as Vice Dean for Faculty and Research. She joined the UCLA faculty in 2005; her previous academic appointments include Professor of Law and Barron F. Black Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, and Visiting Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School.  She regularly teaches Evidence and Torts, as well as seminars in topics relating to expert evidence and law and popular culture.

Professor Mnookin researches and writes primarily in the area of Evidence, particularly expert and scientific evidence, and the use of forensic science in court.  She has written on a variety of evidence-related subjects, including, among others,  Daubert and the appropriate standards for expert evidence; forms of forensic science including latent fingerprint examination and handwriting identification; DNA profiling;  expert evidence and the Confrontation Clause; documentary films and legal evidence;  and the history of expert evidence. Her most recent publications include “The Need for a Research Culture in the Forensic Sciences (with co-authors), 58 UCLA Law Review 725 (2011); The Ira M. Belfer Lecture: “The Courts, The National Academy of Science, and the Future of Forensic Science,” 75 Brooklyn Law Review 1209 (2010), and “The Use of Technology in Human Expert Domains: Challenges and Risks Arising From the Use of Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems in Forensic Science” (with Itiel Dror), Law, Probability & Risk (2010).

Professor Mnookin is also a co-author of The New Wigmore’s Expert Evidence volume (with David Kaye and David Bernstein) (Aspen Publishers, 2004, 2010 (2nd ed) (with annual supplements)), and as of 2011, has joined Modern Scientific Evidence (with David Faigman et al).  Mnookin has spearheaded amicus briefs on behalf of a group of evidence professors several recent Confrontation Clause cases before the Supreme Court, and is currently the primary investigator on a major grant from the NIJ to investigate the relationship between difficulty and error rate in latent fingerprint identification.  She has served on a variety of working groups on issues surrounding forensic science and evidence law, including an NIJ/NIST expert working group on human factors in fingerprint identification; an National Academy of Sciences committee on Daubert and alternatives,  and as an advisory member to an Office of Science & Technology's interagency working group on research issues in forensic science.  She occasionally serves as an expert witness on evidence-related areas.  Mnookin is on the advisory board of several journals and is a member of the ALI. 

Professor Mnookin received her A.B. from Harvard University, her J.D. from the Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology, M.I.T.