Jennifer Mnookin

Jennifer L. Mnookin (born 1967) is the David G. Price & Dallas P. Price professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and the founding co-director of the Program on Understanding Law, Science and Evidence, PULSE@UCLA Law.[1][2] She is an expert on evidence law with a focus on expert and scientific evidence. In 2014, Jennifer Mnookin received the UCLA School of Law's Rutter Award for excellence in teaching.[3] She was named the incoming Dean of the UCLA School of Law on June 4, 2015.

Early life and education

Mnookin was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the daughter of Robert Mnookin, the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School,[4] and Dale Mnookin. She grew up in Berkeley and Palo Alto, California, and attended Harvard College, where she was an editor for The Harvard Crimson.[5] She received her J.D. from the Yale Law School and also holds a Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science and Technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1]

Career

Mnookin joined the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Law in 1998. She was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2002-03 and she moved from UVA to the UCLA School of Law in 2005. While at UCLA, Mnookin has served both as Vice Dean for Faculty and Research and as Vice Dean for External Appointments and Intellectual Life.[1]

Mnookin’s 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. Much of her recent work has focused on the problems of forensic science evidence, especially pattern identification evidence like latent fingerprint identification.[1] She has frequently commented to the press on forensic science and evidence issues[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] and has occasionally consulted or served as an expert witness on the scientific foundation of fingerprint evidence.[13]

Her scholarship on forensic science was cited extensively by the National Academy of Sciences' 2009 report,[14] and she has served on several working groups about forensic science, including the NIST/NIJ Expert Working Group on Human Factors in Latent Print Identification.[15] She is the primary investigator for an NIJ-funded grant attempting to develop objective metrics for measuring the difficult of fingerprint comparisons[16] and is a co-author of two treatises on expert and scientific evidence.[17][18] Her work on the Confrontation Clause was cited and discussed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Williams v. Illinois (2012).[19]

Personal life

Mnookin is married to Joshua Dienstag, a professor of political science at UCLA, and has 2 children.[20][21]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Jennifer L. Mnookin". UCLA School of Law. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  2. "Program on Understanding Law, Science, and Evidence". UCLA School of Law.
  3. "Professor Jennifer Mnookin to be Honored with Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching". UCLA School of Law. Retrieved 16 April 2014.
  4. "Robert H. Mnookin". Harvard Law School. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  5. "Congratulations, Crimson Class of '88, And Good Luck". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  6. "The Real CSI". Public Broadcasting System. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  7. Mnookin, Jennifer. "The Achilles' Heel of Fingerprints". The Washington Post. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  8. Mnookin, Jennifer. "The 'West Memphis Three' and combating cognitive biases". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  9. Mnookin, Jennifer. "Clueless 'science'". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  10. Russell, Sue. "Bias and the Big Fingerprint Dust-Up". Pacific Standard. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  11. Steinhauer, Jennifer. "'Grim Sleeper' Arrest Fans Debate on DNA Use". The New York Times. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  12. Liptak, Adam. "In U.S., Expert Witnesses Are Partisan". The New York Times. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  13. "United States of America v. Raynard Council" (PDF). Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  14. "Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States". The National Academies Press. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  15. "Latent Print Examination and Human Factors: Improving the Practice through a Systems Approach" (PDF). Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  16. Gavel, Lauri. "UCLA professors awarded major federal grant to study error rates in fingerprint evidence". UCLA Newsroom. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  17. Kaye, David; David E. Bernstein; Jennifer L. Mnookin (2013). The New Wigmore: A Treatise on Evidence - Expert Evidence (Second ed.). Aspen Publishers. ISBN 9780735593534.
  18. Faigman, David; Jeremy Blumenthal; Edward Cheng; Jennifer Mnookin; Erin Murphy; Joseph Sanders (2013). Modern Scientific Evidence (2013-2014 ed.). ThompsonReuters. ISBN 9780314817075.
  19. "Williams v. Illinois". Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  20. "Joshua Foa Dienstag". UCLA Department of Political Science. Retrieved 16 April 2014.
  21. "WEDDINGS: Jennifer Mnookin, Joshua Dienstag". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 April 2014.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 4/3/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.