User:Eric Alan Isaacson

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Eric Alan Isaacson is a 1985 graduate of the Duke University School of Law and a member of the California bar. He is President of the Board of Directors of the San Diego Foundation for Change, a Vice President of the Institute for Law and Economic Policy, and a partner in the law firm of Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman and Robbins LLP. Eric's online bio can be found here.

Eric teaches Sunday School at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego, which was organized in the 1870s by San Diego's City Fathers, Alonzo Horton and Judge Moses Luce, and where his wife Susan Kay Weaver currently is a member of the Board of Trustees.

Following his 1985 graduation from the Duke University School of Law, Eric served as a judicial clerk to the Honorable J. Clifford Wallace, Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was associated with the Los Angeles office of O'Melveny & Myers from 1986 to 1989, before joining the San Diego office of Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, which on May 1, 2004 split into two firms, which continue today as Milberg Weiss and Coughlin Stoia.

Eric's legal practice at Coughlin Stoia focuses on federal civil appeals, mostly in securities class actions in which his firm represents plaintiff investors. He also does pro bono work, some with groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, and some independently on behalf of religious organizations - - including the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, the denomination of which his own church is a member, the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry California, and California Faith for Equality. Eric's volunteer work for religious organizations has included friend-of-the-court briefs filed in California's Marriage Cases, for example, and in litigation challenging government support for the Boy Scouts of America, including the Boy Scout Jamboree case, Winkler v. Gates.

Examples of published decisions in cases that Eric has briefed and argued include:

In re WorldCom Securities Litigation (California Public Employees' Retirement System v. Caboto-Gruppo Intesa, BCI), 496 F.3d 245 (2d Cir. 2007) (reversing district court's ruling that filing of a class-action complaint did not toll the time for filing of individual actions by class members who decided to opt out of the class action and pursue their own litigation before the district court had ruled on a class-certification motion);

Sanford v. Memberworks, 483 F.3d 956 (9th Cir. 2007) (reversing order compelling arbitration of telemarketing-fraud claims where plaintiff contested entering the purported contract containing an arbitration clause);

Sanchez v. County of San Diego, 464 F.3d 916 (9th Cir. 2006) (briefed and argued for public-assistance applicants required by County District Attorney to submit to searching “home visits” from law enforcement agents), en banc rehearing denied with eight judges dissenting, 483 F.3d 965 (9th Cir. 2007) (a great disappointment);

In re Daou Systems, Inc., Securities Litigation, 411 F.3d 1006 (9th Cir. 2005) (reversing dismissal of investors' claims for accounting fraud).

Eric's articles on litigation and securities law have been published in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal and the San Diego Law Review. His articles and essays on civil rights, constitutional law, and church-state issues have been published in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, the Pierce Law Review, and the George Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal.

Eric has addressed a variety of legal issues as a symposium panelist or keynote speaker at events sponsored by organizations as diverse as the Institute for Law and Economic Policy, the Case Western Reserve University School of Law’s Sanchez v. County of San Diego, (video archive here) and the Federalist Society. In spare time, Eric posts book reviews to Amazon.com. See, e.g., God is not Great.

Eric has been interviewed on Air America’s The Jon Elliott Show, on KPFK’s Uprising, and on local radio stations in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Eric's objections to the Bush Administration's foreign policy, and to its promotion of social conservatives' political agenda, caused him in 2004 to change his own voter registration from Republican to Democrat.