Lawyer Eric Alan Isaacson is a former civil appellate lawyer with two of the nation’s largest plaintiffs’ class-action law firms. In his current, solo appellate practice, he focuses on civil appeals in federal cases, including pro bono projects to advance social justice.

“Ideas about religious liberty are anything but fixed. I’d like to better understand how it is that notions of religious liberty gain and lose credibility.”

For Isaacson's MRPL project, "Masterpiece Cakeshop and "Hostility" to Religious Belief," he focused on the Supreme Court’s purportedly “narrow” Masterpiece Cakeshop decision reversing a Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruling that a specialty baker violated Colorado’s civil-rights law by refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. In the webinar, he argued the decision is significant because it 1) condemns honest discussions of history by characterizing observations that religion has been employed to justify things like slavery and the Holocaust as impermissible “hostility” to religion, and 2) undermines the Court’s own precedents, which have displayed even greater hostility to religious belief by condemning Mormon beliefs and practices of the time as “odious,” “barbarous,” “nefarious,” “abhorrent,” and “repugnant.” He also pondered the implications that more nuanced understandings of religion in public life might hold for litigation under the First Amendment’s religion clauses.