Blog Archives

Mormon Law 2009 Year in Review

January 14, 2010
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Mormon Law 2009 Year in Review

The waning days of 2009 saw the possible loosening of Utah liquor laws as a national story. Meanwhile, in a development covered by Mormon Matters, the Deseret News suggested that 2009 marked the end of a decade that saw the growing influence of Mormonism in American culture. What was the LDS experience in 2009 in one particular institution – the American courts? After all, court opinions are at least one indication of the larger attitude towards a minority group. In 2009, I counted around 50 federal and state court opinions involving the LDS Church and its members. (This does not…

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Remembering the Howard Hughes “Mormon Will”

October 31, 2009
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Remembering the Howard Hughes “Mormon Will”

Back in 1976, it looked like the LDS Church was going to enjoy a $156 million windfall. The reason? It was the death of billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes, who apparently executed a will leaving one-sixteenth of his estate to the Mormon Church and another one-sixteenth to a man named Melvin Dummar. The claim, which was ultimately rejected by a court in Nevada, went like this. During the last week in December of 1967, Dummar was driving in the late evening in rural Nevada. He pulled off of the main road for a short rest and found a man lying in…

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The Church’s Litigators

October 24, 2009
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The Church’s Litigators

Remember Kenneth Starr? He was the former judge-turned-special-prosecutor who tried to drive Bill Clinton out of office with tawdry tales involving the President’s dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The LDS Church hired Starr, now the dean at Pepperdine Law School, more recently to promote their equities in the California state skirmishes over same-sex marriage. The Church simultaneously relied on a less well-known Salt Lake City lawyer (and 1993 BYU Law grad) named Alexander Dushku, of the law firm of Kirton & McConkie [1]. This interesting anecdote raises the question: Who are the LDS Church’s chosen litigators?

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1968-1970: The Civil Rights Movement Comes to BYU

October 21, 2009
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1968-1970: The Civil Rights Movement Comes to BYU

The 1960s was a time of turmoil in the United States. This turmoil extended to American college campuses. It focused on the Free Speech Movement and civil rights in the south, and gradually extended to the U.S. involvement in the war in Southeast Asia. Some American colleges remained unmolested by the times. One was Brigham Young University. This would not last. In the late 1960s, BYU became the focus of protests at its athletic competitions, over the LDS Church policy of barring blacks from the priesthood.

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Can Mormons Be Fair Judges and Jurors?

October 14, 2009
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The task was simple. Get a list of the area’s religions and invite them to a Cobb County Planning Commission meeting. The clerk went to the Yellow Pages and did her job, with one exception. She intentionally passed over three entries in the directory: the Muslims, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Mormons [1]. The Muslims, we might understand. The Jehovah’s Witnesses? They don’t serve in the military, salute the flag, or vote, and there is a rumor they are not supposed to serve as jurors. But the Mormons? They pride themselves on being good American citizens. Why would they be…

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Mormons, Free Exercise, and Unrighteous Litigation

October 7, 2009
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John Boyle was offended that his country club scheduled golf tournaments on Sunday. He was a Mormon who kept the Sabbath day holy. So he sued. Boyle v. Jerome Country Club, 883 F Supp 1422 (D.Id. 1995) Christina Axson-Flynn was studying acting at the University of Utah. A Mormon, she was uncomfortable that the school’s acting exercises required her characters to utter some dirty words. So she sued. Axson-Flynn v. Johnson, 151 F Supp 2d 1326 (D. Utah 2001). Boyle and Axson-Flynn both claimed that their First Amendment rights were violated. That part of the Constitution, in addition to forbidding…

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Mormons and Intellectual Property

October 3, 2009
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One might think that property, a uniquely secular notion, has no truck with ecclesiastic authorities. After all, there’s supposedly no property in Heaven. Instead, everything is free up there, and there’s no such thing exclusive use and the right to refuse. Jesus said …. never mind. To show how daft the notion of property is to matters of religion, consider a case I stumbled on recently. In it, the court said: Plaintiff, God, claims that Defendant [Arizona State] university is infringing his copyright by using his “autobiography,” namely, “Bible,” without paying him royalties. Complaint at 2. Plaintiff seeks 9.3 million…

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Family Court, Mormon Style

September 30, 2009
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In Maine, Judge Clapp was not pleased. The sarcastic comment he made at an October 6, 1998 custody hearing would get him in trouble. He would ultimately face accusations that he harbored anti-Mormon animus. Well which church? There seems to be a lock on the Mormon Church in this case … which we all know has a lock on family values in the entire world.

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The Church and the IRS

September 26, 2009
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Thomas Vaughn Barlow really does not like the IRS. On June 8, 2007, he sent it a letter, which stated: This means that if you do not answer me lawfully and take my money or property or in any way continue to harass me or fail to assure me of my being secure in my persons, houses, papers and effects, that I’m justified in acts of war to balance your terrorism. Do you get it? I will kill any of your agents I can find. I will blow up your buildings. This is war. Barlow is a Mormon. Well, sort…

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The Growing Mormon Sex Abuse Scandal

September 23, 2009
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The Growing Mormon Sex Abuse Scandal

The chagrin would be immediate from reading these words in a law book: For five years, in defendant’s capacity as a schoolteacher, neighbor, and secretary to the Bishop of the Mormon Church, defendant molested numerous boys in Santa Clara County. As charged in this case, he touched the private parts of four boys who knew him variously as a family friend from church, a teacher in kindergarten and grades two and three, and a home-school religion teacher. So starts People v. Harward [1]. It’s no joke. This language, taken from a real court case, likely sent shivers down the spines…

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Bringing Out The Delusional

September 19, 2009
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As I am hardly the model of mental health myself, I am generally loathe to describe others as crazy. However, one cannot read all of the American court opinions involving the Mormon Church – as I have been doing over the last year or so – without being struck by how many of them involve individuals who seem a little off. Judging just by the four corners of the written opinions, either these people have problems, or they are getting advice from some very bad lawyers. It raises the question that might be difficult for some Mormons to face: does…

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What Mormon Prisoners Want

September 16, 2009
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In an earlier mormonmatters post (here), I examined the rise of Mormons as criminal defendants in court opinions. Not surprisingly, most LDS criminals do not give up their religious affiliation once they go behind the wall. Instead, they find themselves with plenty of time on their hands. They often use that time to act as their own lawyers. What are the deprivations over which Mormon prisoners have gone to court? How do they compare with other similar American religions?

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The Surprising Truth About Mormon Employment Discrimination

September 12, 2009
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The Surprising Truth About Mormon Employment Discrimination

Religious discrimination in the workplace is barred in the United States.  It has been that way since the 1960s.  This prohibition is across the board, and applies whether the employer is a public or private entity.  If you discriminate against your employees on the basis of religion, you could easily end up as a defendant in federal court, sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Many states have anti-discrimination laws as well. Of course, we know about the persecution of Mormons in the 19th Century and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1930s and ’40s.  We also…

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Mormons Doing Nasty Things

September 9, 2009
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Mormons Doing Nasty Things

Are Mormons more often criminals than members of other similar religions? This is a question we will never answer with precision. After all, one’s religion is not asked when booked for a crime. For an accurate assessment of interreligious rates of criminality, such data would be a necessary condition to doing some per-member calculations. However, we might estimate an answer by examining court opinions arising from criminal prosecutions. This method is admittedly a soft proxy. Criminal opinions reflect only a small portion of all criminal prosecutions, and they refer to a defendant’s religion only when it is somehow injected into…

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Overseas Persecution of Mormons: A Comparative Analysis

September 5, 2009
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Overseas Persecution of Mormons: A Comparative Analysis

We know that the LDS Church has projected itself around the world through its missionary efforts. This has occurred during a time when U.S. immigration law was becoming more refugee-friendly. Perhaps it is inevitable that we would start to see cases where individual Mormons seek asylum here in the United States, based on fear of persecution in their home countries. How do these LDS asylum cases compare with asylum cases involving churches with which Mormons are commonly confused – the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Christian Scientists?

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Is Wrongful Excommunication Legally Redressable?

September 2, 2009
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Jeff Breinholt is a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice, and a hobbyist legal researcher/writer on cultural issues, including modern American religious movements. We welcome him to Mormon Matters for a series of guest posts on legal issues in Mormonism. Those who follow Mormonism and who worry about its treatment of dissidents might be excused for thinking that the LDS Church stands alone in its use of excommunication. I must admit I was one of them. I was wrong.

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