State judicial service

He worked as an attorney for the Atlanta Legal Aid Society in 1967. He served as an assistant district attorney of Fulton County in 1968 and from 1970 to 1975. Cooper then served as a judge on the City of Atlanta Municipal Cour from 1975 to 1980. Cooper was the first African-American appointed to a full-time judgeship on the Atlanta Municipal Court^{[citation needed]} and the first African-American ever elected to a county-wide judgeship on the Fulton Superior Court^{[citation needed]}. He was also the first African American assistant district attorney hired to a State Prosecutor's office in Georgia in 1968^{[citation needed]}. Judge Cooper was the presiding Judge in the trial of convicted Atlanta child murderer, Wayne Williams, for serial killings that occurred in 1979 through 1981. He was a judge on the Fulton Superior Court, Georgia from 1980 to 1990. He was a judge on the Georgia Court of Appeals from 1990 to 1994.

Federal judicial service

Cooper was nominated by President Bill Clinton to be a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on March 9, 1994, to a seat vacated by Richard Cameron Freeman. Cooper was confirmed by the United States Senate on May 6, 1994, and received commission on May 9, 1994, and he assumed senior status on February 9, 2009.

Cases

Cooper ordered an Atlanta school system to remove stickers from textbooks which call the theory of evolution "a theory, not a fact." In the case Selman v. Cobb County School District, he ruled that these stickers are an endorsement of religion and as such violate the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution.^[3]

This section needs to be updated. (April 2015)

Cooper was assigned to the case of Whitaker v. Perdue, a federal challenge to Georgia House Bill 1059 which requires that registered sexual offenders cannot live or work within 1,000 feet from schools, school bus stops, churches, day care centers, and areas where children gather, such as parks, recreation centers, playgrounds, swimming pools, etc. In July 2006, Judge Cooper issued a restraining order barring enforcement of the law near the vicinity of bus stops. In August, he certified a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all of Georgia's 11,000 registered sex offenders instead of just the eight plaintiffs. On March 30, 2007, the judge dismissed some of the plaintiff's claims from the suit, including the claim that the law represented cruel and unusual punishment; the rest of the case will go forward. Plaintiff's lawyers had until June 1, 2007, to file a new, revised complaint.^{[citation needed]}