Jennifer L. Mnookin, who has served as the dean of UCLA School of Law since 2015, has been reappointed to a five-year term, UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Emily A. Carter announced in a message to university leadership and the law school community on Sept. 24.

Carter emphasized Mnookin’s distinguished and highly successful leadership of the law school, noting that she and UCLA Chancellor Gene Block asked Mnookin, the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Professor of Law, to continue as dean following a customary review in which the “committee praised Jennifer for her energetic and visionary leadership, her strong problem-solving skills, and her highly effective and successful management.”

Over Mnookin’s first five-year term as dean, she has recruited and retained a diverse and impressive group of faculty members. The law school has inaugurated several new, impactful live-client clinics in areas ranging from immigration law and policy to documentary film to veterans’ justice, and this fall, the law school welcomed a talented first class in its new Master of Legal Studies degree program. Both the academic credentials and the diversity of the student body have risen under her leadership, and UCLA Law raised more than $125 million over the last five years. In addition to raising support for faculty chairs and a number of new scholarships, fundraising successes have led to the creation of the Promise Institute for Human Rights; the Center for Immigration Law and Policy; the Institute for Technology, Law and Policy; the Ziffren Institute for Media, Entertainment, Technology and Sports Law; and the Criminal Justice Program. Mnookin has also served in a variety of leadership roles outside of the law school, including as the chair of UCLA’s Professional School Deans Council, as a trustee of the Law School Admissions Council, and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Science, Technology, and Law.

An expert in forensic evidence, and one of the most highly-cited scholars in evidence law, Mnookin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. She is founder and faculty co-director of PULSE @ UCLA Law (Program on Understanding Law, Science & Evidence) and joined the UCLA Law faculty in 2005 after serving as a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. She holds an A.B. from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology from M.I.T.

“Being the dean of UCLA School of Law has been an incredible opportunity, and I am honored and pleased that Chancellor Block and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Carter have asked me to continue in this role,” Mnookin says. “I very much look forward to continuing to work with our extraordinary students, faculty, alumni, staff and friends to build further on our many strengths, both as a school and as a community.”