Cooper was born on 22 September 1962 in
Salford. At the time of his death, he was a board member of the
Granta Trust. He was made an
OBE in 2007 "for services to human rights". Cooper died four days before his 59th birthday while walking with his husband in the
Scottish Highlands on 18 September 2021. Shortly before his death, Cooper was working with
Helena Kennedy on a proposal to ban
conversion therapy. The
European Human Rights Law Review published a special issue dedicated to his life's work in February 2022. Around the same time, the
University of Oxford’s History Faculty established a new professorship of the History of Sexualities named after Jonathan Cooper, in association with
Mansfield College. The Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexualities is the first fully endowed specialist post focusing on
LGBT history in the UK. It was made possible by a £4.9 million gift from Professor
Peter Baldwin and Dr
Lisbet Rausing, historians and Co-Founders of the
Arcadia Fund. In December 2022, the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law, on initiative of Richard Wagenlander, launched the "Jonathan Cooper LGBTQ+ Mooting Competition", the university's first dedication mooting competition dedicated to promoting the intellectual study of legal issues related to sexual orientation and gender identities. ==Works==