Dallin Oaks and Utah’s Constitution month, 2023
Dallin H. Oaks (law professor, university president, Utah Supreme Court justice, considered for the US Supreme Court, and member of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) was interviewed this week for the 50th anniversary of BYU law school.
“I think the law school has a mission,” he says [at one point], “to continue to train predominantly faithful Latter-day Saints to perform what the legal profession needs to perform under our divinely inspired Constitution, including supporting that Constitution.”
“I have great concern over the proportion of lawmakers and opinion leaders that say the Constitution is outdated. And implied, they say, ‘What we need is a dictator.’ That’s implied. It’s implied in who they support for public office. It’s implied in their opposition to the protections that the Constitution builds in, including separation of powers and the rule of law, which are under fire today.” [1]
I think some people heard and felt the church’s (and therefore Utah’s) emphasis on the Constitution last month (last month specifically, and the last few years generally), and probably thought their leaders’ worry about the Constitution was referring to something else or someone else. Well, President Oaks gives it to us straight, here.
Additionally, these kind of careful, but stern, somewhat surprising quotations are not exactly new from President Oaks. [2] [3]
