Mnookin was born 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 was an editor for The Harvard Crimson.
She received her Juris Doctor from the Yale Law School and also holds a Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Sociology of Science and Technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She is an expert on evidence law with a focus on expert and scientific evidence. She was named the incoming Dean of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law on June 4, 2015. Mnookin joined the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Law in 1998.
She was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2002-2003 and she moved from UVA to the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law in 2005.
While at University of California, Los Angeles, Mnookin has served both as Vice Dean for Faculty and Research and as Vice Dean for External Appointments and Intellectual Life. 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.
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, and she has served on several working groups about forensic science, including the The National Institute of Standards and Technology/NIJ Expert Working Group on Human Factors in Latent Print Identification. She is the primary investigator for an NIJ-funded grant attempting to develop objective metrics for measuring the difficult of fingerprint comparisons and is a co-author of two treatises on expert and scientific evidence. Her work on the Confrontation Clause was cited and discussed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Williams v.
Illinois (2012).
