Early Life, Education, and Law Career
Cooper was born in Nashville and raised in Shelbyville, Tennessee. He is the son of former governor Prentice Cooper and his wife Hortense. He is an Eagle Scout. Jim Cooper attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a member of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of the Chi Psi fraternity, a recipient of the Morehead-Cain Scholarship, and earned a B.A. in history and economics. Cooper won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, where he earned a B.A./M.A. in politics and economics in 1977. In 1980, he received a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
After getting his law degree, he spent two years working for the law firm Waller, Lansden, Dortch and Davis in Nashville, then ran for Congress in 1982.
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