Jennifer L. Mnookin

Biography

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.

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 published numerous academic articles 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, “Of Black Boxes, Instruments, and Experts: Testing the Validity of Forensic Science,” 5 Episteme 343 (2008); “Expert Evidence, Partisanship, and Epistemic Competence,” 73 Brooklyn L. Rev. 1009 (2008) (symposium issue); and “The Validity of Latent Fingerprint Identification: Confessions of a Fingerprinting Moderate,” 7 J. Law, Prob. & Risk 127 (2008). She is also a co-author of The New Wigmore’s Expert Evidence volume (with David Kaye and David Bernstein) (Aspen Publishers, 2004, with annual supplements).

Mnookin is on the board of several academic journals, and is currently a member of the NIJ/NIST Expert Working Group on Human Factors in Fingerprinting. She has served as a member of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Daubert Standards and as Chair of the Evidence Section of the American Association of Law Schools. Mnookin received her A.B. from Harvard College; her J.D. from Yale Law School, and her Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.