She competed on USC’s championship debate team and was active in the Alpha Chi Omega sorority, the Trojan Amazons service organization and the Mortar Board honor society. During her junior year, she was elected vice president of the student body and inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She graduated magna cum laude and became the first woman to receive the prestigious Trojan Diamond Medal for her scholarship and service to the university.

Cooper then enrolled in law school at USC. As one of the few women in the field at the time, she often spoke of the drive and responsibility she and her female colleagues felt to succeed.

“We had a sense of ourselves as invincible,” she said in a 2001 Los Angeles Daily Journal article.

Cooper launched a career as an attorney in partnership with her husband, Grant B. Cooper, while raising their family. A charter member of the American College of Trial Lawyers, she also engaged in community service and civic affairs, and was appointed to Los Angeles’ new Municipal Art Commission in 1945.

A dedicated Trojan, she began a three-year term as an alumni member of the USC Board of Trustees in 1966, then served as the first woman president of the USC Alumni Association for 1967-68 and won an Alumni Service Award in 1970. In 1976, she was elected to a second term on the USC Board of Trustees, serving as an associate trustee until 1986. In 1985, Cooper was among the first group of women admitted into Skull and Dagger and received the organization’s Arnold Eddy Volunteer Service Award a decade later. In 2006, she became the first woman inducted into the USC Half-Century Trojans Hall of Fame.

Cooper was a charter member of the USC University Hospital Guild and a longtime member of Legion Lex, the Trojan League of Los Angeles, the USC/Norris Cancer Center Auxiliary, the Andrus Center Associates and Town and Gown.

She is survived by children Natalie Wallace, Judy Tracy, Meredith Worrell, Grant B. Cooper Jr. and John Norton Cooper, 12 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.