William Bourke Cockran (February 28, 1854 – March 1, 1923), commonly known as Bourke Cockran or Burke Cochran in contemporary reports, was an Irish-American attorney, Democratic Party politician and orator who represented the East Side of Manhattan in the United States House of Representatives for seven non-consecutive terms between 1887 and 1923. An outspoken proponent of progressive taxation and government intervention, Cockran frequently critiqued the unchecked nature of capitalist systems.

Although associated with the liberal and progressive reform movements, he became widely known as the leading national spokesman for the Tammany Society, the powerful Democratic Party political machine in New York. As an advocate for the gold standard, he crossed party lines to endorse William McKinley in the presidential election of 1896.

He was a leading orator of the late 19th and early 20th century, compared favorably by historians to his contemporary political rival, William Jennings Bryan, and to Edmund Burke. Through his personal relationship with the Churchill family, he was an important, early influence on British statesman Winston Churchill.

William Bourke Cockran was born at Claragh Cottage in Ballysadare, County Sligo, Ireland on February 28, 1854. His father was Martin Cockran and his mother was Harriet White Bourke. His father was a gentleman farmer, well educated in the classics, and his mother was the daughter of a prominent magistrate from Leinster. Bourke Cockran's father died in July 1859, and the family relocated to Dublin.

Intending to educate him for a life as a priest, Cockran's mother sent him to France, where he was educated near Lille before returning in 1865 to finish his education at Summerhill College. After graduation, he became a leading member of the debating societies of Dublin.

In 1871, he traveled to New York City with the ambition of becoming a lawyer. On his arrival, he remarked to his mother that he was "a good deal bewildered" by the Gilded Age contrasts in New York society between fabulous displays of wealth alongside abject poverty of the tenements and streets. He gained employment as a clerk at the A. T. Stewart & Company department store, though he never appeared for work, and secured a position as a tutor at St. Teresa's Academy, a private day school for girls on Rutgers Street.

After briefly returning to Ireland to cover the unveiling of a monument to Daniel O'Connell in Dublin as a correspondent for the New York Herald, he declined a position at the foreign news desk and became principal of a public school in Tuckahoe, Westchester County. Studying law privately during the night in the private library of judge Abraham R. Tupper, he was admitted to the bar on September 15, 1876 and opened a solo practice in Mount Vernon. After surviving a bout of diphtheria and mourning the death of his first wife in childbirth, he relocated to New York City in 1878.

After the election of Grover Cleveland as president and Cockran's increasing political influence and fame, he joined in a partnership with William H. Clark, and took on several high-profile cases and clients, including publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who urged on his political activities. He was frequently retained by the New York Central Railroad and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad to argue cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. Other clients included the Long Island Rail Road and the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. By 1895, he earned roughly $100,000 per year ($3,267,708 in 2024 dollars) in legal fees alone.