James Cooper
Academic Director, The Garibay Institute
Professor James Cooper is the Academic Director at The Garibay Institute for Soft Power and Public Diplomacy. He is Professor of Law at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, where he has also served as Associate Dean, Experiential Learning, and an Assistant Dean. Professor Cooper has been a Visiting Professor at UC San Diego’s Earl Warren College, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at University of California, San Diego, a Visiting Professor at the Franz von Liszt Institute at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, and a Short Term Visiting Scholar at the University of Macau. He currently also serves as a Research Fellow at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, a Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelberg in its Master of Law program in Santiago de Chile, and Vice-President of the Garibay Institute, a soft power and creativity think tank headquartered in Los Angeles.
Professor Cooper has been a change agent for countries around the Americas for 25 years, consulting for the U.S. Departments of Justice and State, the Organization of American States, USAID, USPTO, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Bolivian President’s Office, Los Pinos (Mexico’s Executive Branch), Paraguay’s Congress, and a number of other international and regional aid organizations. An Intellectual Property scholar, he has served on the U.S. government delegation to the World Intellectual Property Organization Advisory Committee on Enforcement. A Cambridge University-trained Barrister and Solicitor, Professor Cooper’s public policy work has been commissioned by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation of Germany, and the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission of the Organization of American States.
In the creative world, Professor Cooper has been a photographer for Marie Claire magazine, O Globo, and The Globe and Mail, and a director and producer of documentary films for the BBC, Channel Four UK, the U.S. History Channel, and U.S. public television. He has also directed public education campaigns for the governments of Bolivia, Chile, Germany, and the United States.
Professor Cooper’s work has recently focused on the legal regulation of emerging technologies, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse. He has been an advisor to technology companies in Asia and North America. Professor Cooper has written extensively on financial technology, publishing in/on The Messenger, The Taipei Times, The International Business Times, The Business Times of Singapore, The Hill, Yahoo! Finance, Los Angeles Lawyer, Cointelegraph, Coindesk, and law.com, among other platforms. Professor Cooper is a member of the Advisory Council of Impact NFT Alliance and a member of the Editorial Boards of Revista DESC, the journal of Faculdades de Campinas, Brazil, and The Journal of Digital Assets, a publication of the Korea Fintech Society.
Professor Cooper works with governments, multinational corporations, non-profit organizations, and Indigenous groups to promote economic growth, rule of law, and sustainable development using emerging technologies. He serves as Academic Director of the Garibay Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank that promotes diplomacy through soft power.