Clarence Cooper

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Judge Clarence Cooper (born May 5, 1942 in Decatur, Georgia) is a U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia of the Federal Judiciary of the United States He was appointed to this seat on May 9, 1994 by President Bill Clinton.

Judge Cooper was the first African-American appointed to a full-time judgeship on the Atlanta Municipal Court and the first African-American ever elected to a county-wide judgeship on the Fulton Superior Court. Judge Cooper was also the first African American assistant district attorney hired to a State Prosecutor's office in Georgia in 1968.

Judge Cooper recently 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.

Judge Cooper is currently 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, rec centers, playgrounds, swimming pools, etc. In July 2006, Judge Cooper issued a restraining order barring enforcement of the law against bus stops. In August, he also turned the case into 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, but the rest of the case will go forward. Plaintiff's lawyers have until June 1 to file a new, revised complaint.