Oman on Property and the Latter-day Saint Tradition @nate_oman @WMLawSchool

Nathan B. Oman, William & Mary Law School, is publishing Property and the Latter-day Saint Tradition as a William & Mary Law School Research Paper. Here is the abstract.

The Mormon tradition is marked by a deep engagement with the idea of property. The Latter-day Saints have not yet developed anything as systematic as a theory of property, but there are themes that emerge from their legal tradition. The first is a deeply ambivalent stance toward the idea of property. In contrast to optimistic Lockean stories, Mormon scripture has a darker vision of ownership as a dangerous and frequently corrupting moral force. Property is something in need of redemption. The second theme of the Latter-day Saint tradition is the effort to redeem property by transforming it from the frontier of communal obligation into a nexus of duties toward others. Third, Latter-day Saint efforts to reconceptualize property led to legal conflicts in the 19th century, conflicts that forced changes on not only Mormon practices but on the very text of Mormon scripture. Fourth, while Latter-day Saints’ aspiration for Zion is utopian, their institutional engagement with property has been intensely practical and in its own way pragmatically creative. Indeed, its traces can still be seen within some corners of American law. The final theme has been the effort to turn 19th-century Mormonism’s utopian experiments into a useable past that can continue to inform the thinking of contemporary Latter-day Saints. At the heart of this project is a process that began as early as the 1840s by which what began as sacred law was transformed into sacred history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.