Professor Sarah Cooper's teaching focuses on experiential learning that prepares students for global legal practice. She has led Birmingham City University's United States Internship Programme for over 15 years, developing innovative approaches that enhance students' intercultural competence, digital literacies, and professional readiness for international legal environments. In 2026, she established BCU's first Law and Social Justice Summer School in partnership with the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, New York, creating an immersive international learning opportunity for students across law and the social sciences.

Professor Sarah Cooper's research examines the intersection of law, science, and criminal justice.  Through qualitative and quantitative research methods, her work explores how judges assess claims of unreliable forensic evidence, how jurors interpret expert testimony and lawyers interact with experts, and the role of scientific evidence in post-conviction review, clemency, and compassionate release. Her research highlights how differences between legal and scientific cultures can contribute to error, including wrongful conviction, and argues for greater scientific literacy within legal practice and justice systems.

Her research has informed academic scholarship, legal practice, and judicial understanding, and has been cited by scholars, practitioners, judges, and leading legal treatises. She has secured competitive research funding from organisations including the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, Research England, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Professor Cooper has held visiting research appointments with the Arizona Justice Project, Arizona State University, Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, Amicus, and the Law Library of the United States Congress. In 2023, she delivered the Law Library of Congress Annual Human Rights Day Lecture on Science Literacy and the Law.

Alongside her research, Professor Cooper provides strategic leadership for doctoral education. Alongside leading the That's Me! Project at BCU, she has served as Chair of the Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences Research Degrees and Environment Committee and as Site Director for the Midlands4Cities AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. Since 2025, she has been Co-Director of the University Alliance Future Societies Doctoral Training Programme, a consortium of 10 UK universities. 

An experienced doctoral supervisor, Professor Cooper has supervised research across a diverse range of interdisciplinary topics, including judicial responses to agency science and unreliable science, the role of science in law-making, science literacy in legal education, healthcare in prisons, and scientific and legal conceptions of causation in vaccine injury compensation.