by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Circuit Court Judge Mallory Cooper’s investiture ceremony Wednesday brought an overflow crowd to the Duval County Courthouse.
Courtroom four was packed with Cooper’s family and friends, elected officials, political heavyweights and the largest contingent of judges ever to witness an investiture in Duval County.
Cooper said the crowd was a tribute to her family. Cooper is the daughter of Rosemary and former Circuit Court Judge William Durden, the first general counsel of Jacksonville’s consolidated government. Cooper’s husband William is a partner at Cooper, Ridge & Lattinberg.
Some notes from the investiture:
• Cooper grew up surrounded by some of Florida’s brightest legal minds, but she said it was a lawn mower that finally convinced her to go to law school. Cooper related a tale from her husband’s days as a Marine drill instructor on Paris Island. Bill put Mallory on a fitness regimen that included cutting grass with a 40-pound push mower in the August heat and humidity of Beaufort, S.C. “I said, I’m not doing this the rest of my life, I’m going to law school.”
• Judge Cooper has put on the Circuit Court judge’s robes, but she still doesn’t have a Circuit Court courtroom. The overcrowded Duval County Courthouse doesn’t have one available. Since Mayor John Peyton scrapped plans to build a new courthouse, Judge Charles Arnold offered a solution. He joked that private contractors had been hired to build the “Cooper Courthouse,” on Atlantic Boulevard. The structure comes complete with the ornamental dome that helped convince Peyton to scuttle the courthouse project. After being handed a framed rendering of her courthouse, Cooper said, “I wondered what we were going to do with these renderings. I guess we’ll give them to each other as gifts.”
• Judge Durden acquired a reputation for attention to detail. Judging from his treatment of an inspirational note from Judge Arnold, a former law partner, the reputation was well-earned. Arnold and Durden were young lawyers in 1968 when Arnold scrawled a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes on a slip of paper in an attempt to inspire his friend and partner. Cooper found the note tucked into one of her father’s bibles and noticed that Durden had corrected the grammar.