Celebrated human rights lawyer Amal Clooney and UCLA School of Law Dean Jennifer Mnookin participated in a conversation titled “Doing the Right Thing” on March 11, sharing their perspectives on leadership, success and making a positive difference in the world.
Scores of UCLA students attended the invitation-only webinar, which was part of the UCLA Leaders of Tomorrow series of events, presented by the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. Host and the creator of the series, Eric Esrailian moderated the discussion. He serves on the Geffen School of Medicine faculty, is a dynamic and impactful film producer and member of the greater UCLA community, and spearheaded the effort to create the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law in 2017.
Clooney and Mnookin both described how their respective career trajectories — Clooney as a corporate attorney who turned to human rights work, and Mnookin as a scholar of forensic evidence who emerged as a law school dean — began with an interest in, as Clooney put it, “the process of coming to the truth.” For Mnookin, that meant studying the use of evidence including DNA and fingerprints in the justice system, while Clooney sought out “criminal cases where I was really invested in the outcome.”
