Dallin H. Oaks
Based on Wikipedia: Dallin H. Oaks
In 1975, President Gerald Ford was hunting for a Supreme Court nominee. His shortlist included eleven candidates, and among them was a forty-three-year-old law professor who had clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren, taught at the University of Chicago, and was then running Brigham Young University. Ford ultimately chose John Paul Stevens. Six years later, Ronald Reagan faced the same decision and the same candidate appeared on his list. Reagan chose Sandra Day O'Connor.
The man who twice came within striking distance of the nation's highest court was Dallin Harris Oaks. He never became a Supreme Court justice. Instead, he would become something else entirely—the eighteenth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, leading a faith of nearly seventeen million members worldwide.
It's a trajectory that reveals something fascinating about American life: how a single person can stand at the intersection of law, academia, and religion, and how the path not taken can sometimes lead somewhere even more consequential.
A Father Lost, A Mother Rising
Dallin Oaks was born on August 12, 1932, in Provo, Utah, to Stella Harris and Lloyd Edress Oaks. His given name honored Cyrus Dallin, a renowned Utah sculptor. This wasn't an arbitrary tribute—his mother Stella had posed as the model for Dallin's sculpture "The Pioneer Mother," a bronze statue that still stands in Springville, Utah.
When Dallin was seven, his father died of tuberculosis. He was thirty-seven years old.
What followed was the kind of disruption that reshapes a childhood. Stella, overwhelmed by grief, suffered a breakdown that left her temporarily unable to care for her children. Dallin and his two younger siblings—including his brother Merrill—went to live with their maternal grandparents in Payson, Utah.
The loss was profound. Losing his father, then watching his mother struggle, left young Dallin unable to concentrate in school. The stability that children depend upon had vanished.
But here's where the story takes an unexpected turn. Stella Oaks didn't just recover—she transformed. She earned a graduate degree from Columbia University. She became head of adult education for the Provo School District. In 1956, she became the first woman ever elected to the Provo City Council, where she served two terms. She even briefly served as the city's assistant mayor.
The boy who had watched his mother collapse watched her rise to become a local political pioneer. It's hard to imagine this didn't shape his understanding of what resilience looks like.
The Radio Kid
From about age ten to sixteen, Dallin split his time between two Utah towns. During the school year, he lived in Vernal with his mother, who taught high school there. Summers meant returning to his grandparents in Payson while Stella pursued her degree at Columbia.
At twelve, Oaks got his first job sweeping floors at a radio repair shop in Vernal. This wasn't just pocket money—it was the beginning of a genuine technical education. He learned the equipment, understood the machinery, and by the spring of 1948, at just fifteen years old, he had earned his first-class radio operator license.
That's not a trivial credential. A first-class radio license required demonstrating real technical competence in electronics and broadcasting regulations. Oaks would go on to work as an engineer and announcer for radio stations in both Vernal (KJAM) and Provo (KCSU).
Meanwhile, he earned Eagle Scout at fourteen, played football and oboe, competed in debate, and performed in dramatic productions. The kid was, in the language of his era, a joiner—but a joiner who actually excelled at the things he joined.
Love at a Basketball Game
Oaks attended Brigham Young University after graduating from Brigham Young High School in 1950. At BYU, he continued his radio work, occasionally announcing high school basketball games.
At one of these games during his freshman year, he met June Dixon, a senior at the high school whose game he was calling. They married in 1952, during his junior year, in the Salt Lake Temple.
Here's an interesting wrinkle: Oaks never served as a full-time missionary for the LDS Church, which is unusual for someone who would eventually lead the faith. The reason was practical—his membership in the Utah National Guard and the possibility of being called up for the Korean War made a two-year mission impractical.
He graduated from BYU in 1954 with a bachelor's degree in accounting, graduating with high honors.
Chicago and the Law
Oaks's next move took him far from Utah, geographically and intellectually. He won a full-tuition National Honor Scholarship to the University of Chicago Law School, one of the most rigorous legal programs in the country.
The University of Chicago Law School had developed a distinctive approach to legal education. While many law schools focused primarily on learning legal rules and procedures, Chicago emphasized law and economics—the idea that legal rules should be analyzed for their economic efficiency and real-world consequences. It was an intellectual hothouse that produced some of the most influential legal thinkers of the twentieth century.
Oaks thrived. He became editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review, a position that typically goes to the very top of the class. In 1957, he graduated cum laude with his Juris Doctor.
Then came the opportunity of a lifetime.
Clerking for Earl Warren
After graduation, Oaks secured a clerkship with Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court.
To understand what this meant, you have to understand who Earl Warren was. As Chief Justice from 1953 to 1969, Warren led the Court through some of the most consequential decisions in American history. Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. Miranda v. Arizona, which established that police must inform suspects of their rights. Reynolds v. Sims, which required state legislative districts to be roughly equal in population.
The Warren Court didn't just interpret the Constitution—it transformed American society. And Dallin Oaks, fresh from law school, had a front-row seat for a year of this transformation.
A Supreme Court clerkship is more than a prestigious credential. Clerks work closely with their justices, researching cases, drafting opinions, and debating the most complex legal questions of the day. It's an education that no classroom can replicate.
Private Practice and Academia
After his clerkship, Oaks joined Kirkland & Ellis, a powerhouse Chicago law firm. His supervisor there was Robert Bork—yes, that Robert Bork, who would later become famous for his own failed Supreme Court nomination in 1987.
Oaks quickly established himself as a principal lawyer, handling corporate litigation for clients including Standard Oil of Indiana, B.F. Goodrich, and Chemetron Corporation. According to historian Lavina Fielding Anderson, he became the first Kirkland & Ellis attorney to represent an indigent client before the Illinois Supreme Court—an unusual commitment to pro bono work at an elite corporate firm.
But private practice couldn't hold him. In 1961, after just three years at Kirkland & Ellis, Oaks returned to the University of Chicago as a law professor.
His academic specialty was trust and estate law, along with gift taxation—not the sexiest areas of legal scholarship, but ones with enormous practical importance for how wealth gets transferred across generations. He collaborated with George Bogert on a new edition of a leading casebook on trusts.
Yet his interests ranged wider. In 1963, he edited a book called "The Wall Between Church and State," exploring the legal relationship between government and religion. That same year, he wrote about the Supreme Court's school prayer decisions for the LDS Church's magazine, translating complex constitutional law for a general audience.
He also wrote extensively about the Fourth Amendment and the exclusionary rule—the legal doctrine that prevents prosecutors from using evidence obtained through illegal searches. Oaks was a critic of the exclusionary rule, arguing that it let guilty people go free without adequately deterring police misconduct. This was a controversial position, especially in an era when civil libertarians saw the rule as essential protection against government overreach.
By 1964, Oaks had become a full professor. He served as interim dean, advised the law school's legal aid clinic, and worked on anti-poverty issues. He felt that federal programs of the era focused too much on symptoms rather than root causes.
In 1968, he became a founding member of the editorial board of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, an independent intellectual publication that explored LDS history, theology, and culture. He would resign from the board in early 1970.
The Sit-In and the Attack
1969 brought a very different kind of challenge.
The late 1960s were tumultuous on American campuses. Student protests against the Vietnam War, racial injustice, and university policies swept through institutions nationwide. The University of Chicago was not immune.
When 160 students staged a sit-in at the administration building, Oaks was appointed chairman of the disciplinary committee. His job was to conduct hearings and determine consequences.
He was physically attacked. Twice.
The hearings ultimately resulted in over 100 students being either suspended or expelled. It was a formative experience in institutional leadership during crisis—and in standing firm when pressured.
President of BYU
In 1971, Oaks left Chicago to become the eighth president of Brigham Young University.
He was succeeding Ernest L. Wilkinson, a controversial figure whose seventeen-year presidency had transformed BYU from a small regional school into a major university—but whose authoritarian style had created lasting tensions. Wilkinson had been intensely politically active, running unsuccessfully for Senate as a conservative Republican. He had also presided over a surveillance program that monitored student and faculty political activities.
Oaks represented something different. Where Wilkinson was austere and controlling, Oaks was collegial and delegating. He believed disciplinary matters should be handled by the dean of students, not micromanaged from the president's office. He created a Faculty Advisory Council where professors could be elected by their peers. He established clear, standardized lines of authority.
The contrast was stark enough that Oaks spent considerable effort distancing BYU from the partisan political atmosphere of the Wilkinson years, establishing policies preventing administrators from participating in partisan politics.
During his decade as president, Oaks oversaw the creation of the J. Reuben Clark Law School—giving BYU its own legal program—and the Graduate Business School. Enrollment grew twenty percent. Library holdings doubled to two million volumes. The percentage of faculty holding doctoral degrees increased.
He also focused on gender equity, at least by the standards of the era. BYU instituted affirmative action policies to hire more women and worked to equalize salaries between male and female employees. He established a committee to investigate gender discrimination. In 1975, BYU prohibited distributing church-sponsored scholarships based on gender.
These efforts had limits. By the end of his presidency, the number of female full professors remained nearly unchanged, and BYU still lagged other universities in female employment by about five percent.
Fighting the Federal Government
Much of Oaks's presidency involved battles with federal agencies attempting to impose regulations on BYU.
The most significant conflict involved Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. The law potentially threatened BYU's practice of requiring unmarried students to live in gender-segregated housing, whether on or off campus.
Oaks led a fight against applying Title IX to non-educational programs at schools that didn't accept direct government aid. BYU was one of the first schools to voice opposition. The conflict ultimately ended in an agreement with the Department of Education allowing BYU to retain its gender-specific housing requirements.
There were other skirmishes. In 1975, what was then the Department of Housing, Education and Welfare tried to argue that BYU's honor code was discriminatory based on sex. BYU prevailed. In 1976, the Justice Department pressured small landlords to stop upholding BYU's housing standards. BYU prevailed again. In 1979, the Internal Revenue Service demanded that BYU disclose donor names, claiming donors were overvaluing their contributions. A federal court ruled the demand unjustified.
These battles shaped Oaks's view of government power over private institutions. He served for three years as president of the American Association of Presidents of Independent Colleges and Universities, becoming a prominent voice against federal intrusion in private education.
The Book on Carthage
In the midst of his administrative duties, Oaks found time for scholarship. With BYU history professor Marvin S. Hill, he co-authored "Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith."
The book examined the legal proceedings following the 1844 murder of LDS Church founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum by a mob at Carthage Jail in Illinois. The trial of the accused assassins was a study in how legal processes can fail when community sentiment runs against justice—all defendants were acquitted despite substantial evidence of guilt.
The book won the Mormon History Association's Best Book prize in 1976. It represented a kind of scholarship that was unusual for a university president: rigorous, original, and deeply engaged with the uncomfortable complexities of the faith he belonged to.
Broadcasting and Corporate Boards
Oaks's influence extended beyond BYU. For five years, from 1979 to 1984, he served as chairman of the board of directors of the Public Broadcasting Service—PBS, the organization that brings Americans Sesame Street, Masterpiece Theatre, and Ken Burns documentaries.
He also chaired the board of the Polynesian Cultural Center, a major tourist attraction in Hawaii that showcases Pacific Island cultures and is owned by the LDS Church. Over his career, he served as a director of Union Pacific Corporation and Union Pacific Railroad.
These weren't merely honorific positions. Board service at this level involves genuine fiduciary responsibility, strategic decision-making, and oversight of major organizations. Oaks was building a network and a reputation that extended far beyond the Mormon world.
The Utah Supreme Court
In 1980, Oaks left BYU's presidency to accept appointment as a justice of the Utah Supreme Court.
This was a significant transition. As a justice, Oaks moved from running an institution to interpreting law—from executive to judicial functions. The Utah Supreme Court is the state's highest court, the final word on Utah law and the last resort for most litigants in the state.
He served on the court for four years. It was during this period that he was again considered for the United States Supreme Court, this time by President Reagan in 1981. Again, he was passed over—this time for Sandra Day O'Connor, who would become the first woman on the Supreme Court.
Called to the Apostleship
In 1984, everything changed again.
Oaks was called to join the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the LDS Church. In Mormon theology, the Quorum of the Twelve are considered apostles in the biblical sense—special witnesses of Jesus Christ with worldwide responsibilities for teaching, governing, and leading the church.
This calling required Oaks to resign from the Utah Supreme Court. It also meant leaving behind the secular career that had taken him to the heights of American law and academia. From this point forward, his life would be devoted entirely to religious leadership.
The appointment wasn't entirely surprising. Oaks had deep roots in the church. Through his mother, he was a second great-grandnephew of Martin Harris, one of the Three Witnesses who testified to having seen the golden plates from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. This genealogical connection to the church's founding events gave Oaks a particular place in LDS history.
The Path to the Presidency
In the LDS Church, leadership succession follows a distinctive pattern. When a church president dies, the senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve automatically becomes the new president. Seniority is determined not by age but by time in the quorum.
In 2018, Oaks was called as first counselor in the First Presidency under President Russell M. Nelson. The First Presidency consists of the church president and his two counselors, functioning as the highest governing body of the faith.
When Nelson died in January 2025 at the age of 100, Oaks, as the senior apostle, became the eighteenth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He was 92 years old.
A Life at the Intersection
Dallin Oaks's biography raises fascinating questions about the paths available to talented individuals in American society.
Twice he was considered for the Supreme Court. Had Ford or Reagan chosen differently, the history of American jurisprudence might look very different. An Oaks Court would likely have been more skeptical of the exclusionary rule, more protective of religious institutions against government regulation, more willing to blur the wall between church and state that he had written about as a young professor.
Instead, he took a different path—one that led not to interpreting the Constitution but to leading a global faith.
What's remarkable is how thoroughly his legal training informed his religious leadership. The precision of his statements, the careful construction of arguments, the attention to institutional procedures—these are the habits of a lawyer, brought to bear on matters of faith.
His life also illustrates the particular position of Mormons in American society. The LDS Church has produced prominent figures in law, business, and politics—Mitt Romney, Harry Reid, J. Willard Marriott—yet remains distinct from the Protestant mainstream. Oaks navigated both worlds: elite American institutions and the distinctive community of the Saints.
From a seven-year-old boy who lost his father to tuberculosis in Depression-era Utah, to the leader of a worldwide church, Dallin Oaks's life spans nearly a century of American history. The radio kid from Vernal who earned his first-class license at fifteen became a law clerk to Earl Warren, a university president, a state supreme court justice, and finally the president of a faith that claims to be the restoration of Christ's original church.
The Supreme Court seat went to others. What Oaks received instead was something harder to measure but, for believers, infinitely more significant: the mantle of prophecy.