Howard Cooper Honored by Best Lawyers in America as Boston Civil Rights Law 'Lawyer of the Year'
Howard M. Cooper was named 2017 Boston Civil Rights Law "Lawyer of the Year" by Best Lawyers in America. Only a single lawyer in each practice area in each community is honored as a Lawyer of the Year.
Mr. Cooper, first selected to Best Lawyers in America in 2006, is a founding partner of Todd & Weld. He regularly handles significant civil rights matters that are often of public significance. Noteworthy civil rights matters that Mr. Cooper has handled include:
- Representing South Middlesex Opportunity Council (SMOC), an anti-poverty agency, in its landmark and highly successful case against the Town of Framingham and numerous Framingham public officials in which the agency sought to secure fair housing rights for the disabled. The widely reported 2010 settlement of that case included a payment of $1 million to SMOC, and a commitment by the defendants to training and future compliance with applicable civil rights laws in a settlement approved by the U.S. District Court.
- As lead coordinating counsel for the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild, successfully representing the Occupy Boston movement in 2011 in obtaining a temporary restraining order allowing the protesters to remain encamped in Dewey Square in Boston for nearly a month after other encampments had been dispersed nationally.
- Successfully representing a Boston-area Islamic group in connection with their building of a Mosque and Cultural Center in Roxbury. Post 9/11, the group came under attack from Islamaphobic organizations. Mr. Cooper's representation of the Boston-area Muslim community in that case has been widely described as courageous, and he received an award presented by Boston area Muslims thanking him for his commitment to civil rights and religious freedom.
In addition to Civil Rights Law, Mr. Cooper was also selected to the 2017 Best Lawyers in America directory for Commercial Litigation and First Amendment Law.
First published in 1983, Best Lawyers lists are compiled based on an exhaustive peer-review evaluation. Over 83,000 leading attorneys globally are eligible to vote.
For the 2017 edition of The Best Lawyers in America, 7.3 million votes were analyzed, which resulted in more than 55,000 leading lawyers being included in the new edition. Lawyers are not required or allowed to pay a fee to be listed. Corporate Counsel magazine has called Best Lawyers "the most respected referral list of attorneys in practice."