# Christopher Cooper **Christopher Reid Cooper** (b. 1966, Mobile, Alabama) is a U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia and, in 2026, the judge who twice blocked the renaming of the [[Kennedy Center]] for [[Donald Trump]]. ## Background Yale (B.A. *summa cum laude*, 1988), Stanford Law (1993, president of the *Stanford Law Review*). He clerked for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the D.C. Circuit, served in the Justice Department as a special assistant to the deputy attorney general from 1994 to 1996, then practiced at Miller Cassidy, Baker Botts and Covington & Burling. Barack Obama nominated him on August 1, 2013; the Senate confirmed him **100–0** on March 26, 2014. The unanimous confirmation is worth keeping in view, because the rulings below are routinely described as partisan. Nobody in the Senate of 2014 thought so. ## The Kennedy Center rulings Cooper is the trial judge in the suit brought by Representative [[Joyce Beatty]], an ex-officio Kennedy Center trustee, after the Trump-appointed board moved to rename the institution. - **May 2026** — He rules for Beatty. Federal law names the institution for President Kennedy and requires that no other person be memorialized there; the holding is that *"Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it."* - **September 15, 2026** — He blocks the board's August workaround, which had left the institution's name alone while renaming the *building* for Trump and the *grounds* "President Donald J. Trump Plaza." He describes the board's parsing as **"linguistic gymnastics"** and states the rule at its widest: *"Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress's blessing."* The second ruling is the analytically interesting one. The board's strategy was to concede the statutory holding and relocate the honor to objects the statute does not name. Cooper's answer treats the statute as governing the *act of memorializing* at that site rather than the *string* in the institution's title — which is why the opinion closes the gap rather than inviting a third attempt. The board appealed to the D.C. Circuit the same evening. ## See Also - [[Kennedy Center]] — the institution, and the full renaming sequence - [[Joyce Beatty]] — the plaintiff - [[United States District Courts]] — the court - [[Federal Judges Hub]] - [[Contested Symbols Hub]] — the wider pattern the case sits in