by Glenn Tschimpke
Staff Writer
Mallory Cooper was born when her father was in law school at the University of Florida. Her husband is a lawyer. Her husband’s brother is a lawyer. Her sister is a lawyer. Her brothers are lawyers. Her sister-in-law is a lawyer. Her son is in law school. So it’s no big surprise that Cooper herself has dabbled in law a little bit.
OK, she’s more than dabbled. She’s been a Duval County Court judge for the last five years and before that she was a prosecutor for the State Attorney’s Office for nearly a decade.
With a family steeped in law — her father, William Durden, went on to become a circuit judge — one would think Cooper would have been eager to establish her legal career since the first time she gripped a pencil in grade school and learned how to spell “L-A-W.” But life’s events and maybe even a little Southern tradition slowed her progress.
Sure she has hobbies that tend to gravitate to activities like cooking and decorating that make her a bona fide Southern gal. Her Coca-Cola Cake draws people from the nether regions of the county courthouse when she brings it to work. She is dead serious about decorating — especially during Christmas.
“It takes me a month to decorate my house,” she said. “My friends call me the Christmas Doctor. I keep boxes full of ribbons and trims and things like that in my car. There are several people’s homes I go to every year and add a bow here or change the garland there or hang up some beads or whatever. I kind of help them finish things off so it looks a little prettier.”
But when it came down to it, Cooper had higher professional aspirations than her merchandising degree could have taken her.
While she’s a bit reticent to divulge dates and time lines that could betray her age, Cooper hints that when she graduated Winthrop University near Rock Hill, S.C., women still took “traditional” jobs. Female lawyers were as common as snow flakes in Jacksonville.
These days, names like Sharon, Karen, Linda and Mallory hardly raise an eyebrow when attached to professional titles like attorney, doctor, mayor or judge. Times have changed, however, since her days in college.
“Winthrop was the state girls school at the time I went there,” said Cooper. “Clemson was the state boys school. At the time I was going, they were beginning to let the opposite sex attend each university as a day student. Of course, now they’re both totally coed.”
She put her merchandising degree to work in Charlotte for a year after college until she came back to hometown Jacksonville to teach third grade at Dinsmore Elementary. Along the way, she met and married husband Bill, who was attending law school in Gainesville. Uncle Sam interrupted Bill’s college plans with an invitation to the United States Marine Corps.
Cooper followed her groom from base to base around the Southeast, teaching grade school when she could find work. When Bill was sent to Vietnam, she came back to Jacksonville to teach fifth grade at Sherwood Forest Elementary School.
Bill continued law school after his stint with the service, while Cooper worked night shift at a printing company.
As was the thing to do at the time, a tour through Europe beckoned. Bill parlayed a summer semester of law school in England into an extended jaunt through Europe.
“Bill bought a motorcycle from an old Marine buddy of his,” said Cooper. “We spent 10 weeks traveling all over Europe: England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and finally Amsterdam. We stopped in villages to buy cheese and breads and meats and then we’d go eat lunch out in the fields.”
Did 10 weeks on the back of a motorcycle equate to sore trousers?
“Not really,” she said. “We stopped a lot. I’m glad we did it because we never had another chance to do it again. You just can’t get the time off.”
It wasn’t until her two children, Collins and Cameron, were in grade school did her legal career begin. Every week she commuted from Jacksonville to Florida State University to attend classes.
“Law school was not easy,” she explained. “Especially the way I had to do it. My kids and husband were in Jacksonville and I would go out there to Tallahassee on Sunday nights and come back on Friday afternoons.
“My thought was that it would be better to spend three years getting a higher education — something I could use to support me or my children if I ever had to if anything ever happened,” she added. “Or I could spend three years trying to start up a business and end up with nothing and still spend a lot of hours doing it. So I chose to do the other. Frankly, nobody thought I could get in law school. They really thought it was just a lark.”
Two and a half years of hard work later, Cooper’s lark landed her a job at the State Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor in the juvenile and and special assault units. After a decade of working for state attorneys Ed Austin and Harry Shorstein, she ran for a vacant county court seat against Kathy Sands (who is now a general master) and won. Commissioned Jan. 7, 1997, Cooper continued in juvenile court as a judge where she left off as a prosecutor.
She related a story about one particular little girl.
“One little girl in juvenile, it was her cousin who had abused her,” she said. “We went all the way through the trial and he was found to have committed the offense. When it was all over and the appeal was over and all that, I was able to take her to lunch one day, which you couldn’t do while it was pending. We walked down to the Landing. These people were originally from the hills of Tennessee. They lived in a small trailer. We walked into a restaurant and her eyes, literally, were as big as saucers. She looked around because it has real high ceilings and plants hanging down. She looked at me and she says, [in a twangy voice] ‘It sure is big, ain’t it?’”
As for plans beyond county court, Cooper has her eye on a circuit court position. She has the experience — she spent a year as a circuit judge by special appointment handing dependency cases — but it could be a matter of timing. The children are out of the house. Collins was a kicker on the 1996 Florida Gators national championship football team and has since moved on to law school. Cameron is a junior at the University of Georgia.
“I very much would like to excel in county court and then certainly look at whether circuit court would be an option,” she said. “I happen to think a lot of my strengths are appropriate for circuit court because of my work with juvenile dependency and delinquency and family law, which is very related to circuit court. So I think I have a lot of strengths that suit that work well.”