Laura Cooper
Laura Cooper has been the neutral, representing the public at large, since PERB commenced operations in 2016, initially as an Alternate Member. She has been a Member since 2019 and was its Chair from 2023-2025.
She is a University of Minnesota Law School Emeritus Professor. Her courses there from 1975-2017 included Labor Law, Labor Arbitration, ADR in the Workplace, and the Capstone Course in Labor and Employment Law. She held the J. Stewart and Mario Thomas McClendon Professorship in Law and Alternative Dispute Resolution and spent a summer between academic terms as an Attorney for Region Eighteen of the National Labor Relations Board.
Cooper is the author or co-author of nine books and more than thirty-five law review articles. Her scholarship includes empirical, historical, analytical, and pedagogical approaches to topics in labor law and labor dispute resolution.
She has decades of experience as a labor arbitrator and is a Member of the National Academy of Arbitrators for which she served as Vice President. She chaired the Labor Law Group, an international association of labor and employment law scholars, and was President of the Minnesota Chapter of the Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution. Cooper chaired the Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law of the Association of American Law Schools and, from 2009 to 2018, was Co-Editor of the ABA Journal of Labor and Employment Law .
She was President of both the Legal Aid Society of Minneapolis and Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid and was the Fund for Legal Aid’s 2008 Honoree. Since 2018, she has been a volunteer teacher of citizenship courses at the International Institute of Minnesota.
Cooper is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Southern California, and a summa cum laude graduate of the Indiana University School of Law (Bloomington) where she was Executive Editor of the Indiana Law Journal . Following law school, she clerked at the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
