Jennifer Mnookin

Jennifer L. Mnookin is an American legal scholar and academic serving as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 2022. She previously served as dean of the UCLA School of Law, where she was David G. Price and Dallas P. Price Professor of Law. While at UCLA Law, she co-founded and co-directed the Program on Understanding Law, Science and Evidence.

Early life and education
Born in 1967 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jennifer Mnookin is the daughter of Dale Mnookin and Robert Mnookin, the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She grew up in Berkeley and Palo Alto, California. For college she returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Harvard College, where she became an editor for The Harvard Crimson and earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1988. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995 and a Ph.D. in the history and sociology of science and technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999.

Career
From 1998 to 2005, Mnookin was on the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Law, with one year (2002–03) spent as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. She joined the faculty of UCLA Law in 2005, where she then served as vice dean for faculty and research from 2007–09, vice dean for external appointments and intellectual life from 2012–13, and dean from 2013-2022. On April 23, 2020, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. On May 16, 2022, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents announced they had unanimously chosen Mnookin to be the 30th chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She took office on August 4, 2022.

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. 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 research 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.

Response to Gaza Protests
On May 1, 2024, Mnookin authorized campus police to dismantle an encampment set up by students in protest of Israeli violence in Gaza. Campus police were assisted by the Madison Police Department, the Dane County Sheriff's Office, and Wisconsin State Patrol, totaling in roughly 80 officers. The teardown of the encampment resulted in 34 arrests of students, professors and community members. Most protestors were released without citation, though four were booked at the county jail. The tactic garnered several responses. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester praised Mnookin on X, "for doing the right thing by enforcing campus policies and standing up to the unruly mob." Others condemned the police presence. Madison Alderman MGR Govindarajan responded by saying that the "actions seen this morning were beyond what was necessary. I’ve heard of both students and community members bleeding, clothes being torn, with safety being just an afterthought.” Govindarajan represents the UW campus area on City Council.

Saba, of the UW-Madison Students for Justice in Palestine, responded to the arrests with the following words, as quoted in The Capital Times:

“We will be prepared to continue fighting for what we believe, which is that UW-Madison should divest from apartheid in Israel... It’s shameful that the University of Wisconsin-Madison would rather use violence against their community, against their students, against their faculty, against their staff, than negotiate with us in good faith.”

At the time of the arrests, Mnookin had failed to meet with students.

Following the arrests, students reinstated the camp and in-person negotiations commenced with the administration.

Personal life
Mnookin married Joshua Foa Dienstag, a professor of political science and law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1996. They have two children, Sophia and Isaac.