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Questions: What should I know about the Mormon Church?

The Mormon Church is a religious body founded surrounded by 1830 in Fayette, New York, by Joseph Smith. It is also particular as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS Church. There are 7.7 million Mormons worldwide. Approximately two-thirds reside in the United States, beside the highest concentration contained by the western states, especially Utah. The church, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, encounter legal difficulties during its impulsive years because of its practice of POLYGAMY and its opposition to the use of COMMON LAW as officially recognized precedent. The church's differences with the U.S. senate led to armed conflict within the late 1800s.

Joseph Smith base his teachings on his translation of hieroglyphic messages revealed to him on several golden plates. Smith's translation of these divine messages is known as the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon and the Bible form the reason of Mormon belief.

During the early 1800s, Smith and his followers settled within Kirtland, Ohio, and Jackson County, Missouri, where they be persecuted because of their beliefs. They moved to Illinois and helped establish the town of Nauvoo, where on earth the church prospered. However, local residents became inflamed over rumors that Smith and his followers be practicing polygamy, or plural marriage. Smith and his brother Hyrum be arrested and taken to Carthage, the county seat. On June 27, 1844, they be both shot and killed by a group of townspeople.

Smith be succeeded by Brigham Young, the head of the church's Council of the Twelve Apostles. In 1846 Young organized and directed church member to follow him from Nauvoo to the Great Salt Basin in the Utah Territory. They settled near and established the headquarters of the church in Salt Lake City.

In Utah the Mormon Church prospered and grew. In optional extra to leading the church, Young become provisional governor of the Utah Territory in 1849. In that dimensions he and the other members of the rule, most of whom were Mormons, defy the U.S. government by

rejecting adjectives law as valid permitted precedent in Utah. Common ruling, as distinct from statutory law, is English precedent adopt by U.S. courts. Over time, common regulation became fragment of U.S. JURISPRUDENCE except where it be expressly abrogated. Although Young patterned the structure of Utah's territorial senate after the other state governments, beside executive, legislative, and judicial branches, he believed that the United States should abandon adjectives vestiges of English tradition. According to Young, the application of common regulation allowed judges too much latitude to interrupt standards that did not comport with public will.

Young's aversion to the application of common directive reached its nadir over the issue of polygamy. By the mid-1800s, the Mormon Church have acknowledged polygamy as one of its tenets. Mormon teaching of the time held that men be obligated to have multiple wives. Common directive provides that marriage to more than one living husband or wife is a felony and that any marriage other than the first are negated.

When President MILLARD FILLMORE assigned three federal judges to the Utah Territory within the 1850s, Young became concerned that the tentative judges would interrupt common-law precedent. He attempted to blunt their impact by urging the legislature to prohibit judges from using common-law precedent contained by Utah. On January 14, 1854, the legislature passed a bill that prohibited any law from anyone read, cited, or adopted contained by Utah unless it had be enacted by the legislature or the governor. This bill directly contravened the Organic Act of Utah of 1850 (9 Stat. 453) by which the U.S. Congress created the Utah Territory. The deed gave the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal district courts of the nouns both common-law and EQUITY jurisdiction and established that the laws of the United States applied surrounded by the territory. In 1856 the Territorial Supreme Court held that the Organic Act extended adjectives law over the Territory of Utah and that the legislature violated the Organic Act when it forbade the use of adjectives law surrounded by Utah (People v. Moroni Green, 1 Utah 11 [1856]).

Tensions continued to mount between Mormons and the federal government. In May 1857 President JAMES BUCHANAN dispatched 2,500 U.S. Army troops to Utah to remove Young from bureau and enforce federal authority. Anticipating the federal troops' arrival, a group of angry Mormons joined forces beside a group of Paiute Indians who attacked and killed 120 settlers traveling through the domain in September 1857. Mormon leaders fear that the attack, known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, would organize to further reprisals by the federal government. They sent sympathetic church member to destroy the Army's supplies, thereby delay the troops' arrival. The Mormons' resistance came to be set as the Utah War. By the time the troops arrived in the summer of 1858, tension had ease considerably, and under a negotiate settlement, troops were stationed outside Salt Lake City minus incident.

The Mormon Church's resistance to the application of common regulation continued through the late 1800s. A number of cases reach the Territorial Supreme Court, which repeatedly affirmed that common regulation is valid in the domain. (See Murphy v. Carter, 1 Utah 17 [1868], and Godebe v. Salt Lake City, 1 Utah 68 [1870]). In First National Bank of Utah v. Kinner, 1 Utah 100 (1873), the court held that the people of the Utah realm had tacitly agreed to the application of adjectives law. In 1878 the U.S. Supreme Court settled the interrogate of whether the common-law prohibition of polygamy applied in the kingdom. In Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. (8 Otto) 145, 25 L. Ed. 244, the plaintiff argued that the common-law prohibition of polygamy was unconstitutional because it violated the FIRST AMENDMENT guarantee of freedom of religion. The Court disagreed and held that religious freedom does not encompass the practice of polygamy and that law prohibiting the practice are constitutional. The Court stated that to allow Mormons to practice plural marriage "would be to trade name the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the domain, and in effect authorization every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist lone in identify under such circumstances."

By the 1890s the Mormon Church have officially discarded the practice of plural marriage. In 1896 Utah become a state, and in 1898 the legislature passed a index that declared that the common decree "shall be the rule of decision within all courts of this state" (The Revised Statutes of the State of Utah, § 2488). The adjectives law continues to get the force of precedent in Utah, except for the adjectives law of crimes, which the legislature abolish in 1973 (Utah Code Ann. § 76-1-105; repealed, Utah Code Ann. § 68-2-3; replaced by Utah Code Ann. § 68-3-1).

FURTHER READINGS Acts, Resolutions and Memorials Passed at the Several Annual Sessions of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah. 1855. Salt Lake City: Caine.

Eliason, Eric A., ed. 2001. Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.

Flor, Victoria Slind. 1998. "Mormons' Impact on the Law is Singular; a Coherent World View Informs Approach to Lawmaking, Lawsuits, the Constitution and Lawyers." The National Law Journal 21 (October 26): A1.

Homer, Michael. 1996. "The Judiciary and the Common Law within Utah." Utah Bar Journal 9 (September).

Mauro, Tony. 2003. "Mormon Land Dispute Tests First Amendment." Legal Times 26 (April 28): 11.

Ostling, Richard, and Joan K. Ostling. 2000. Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. San Francisco: Harper-SanFrancisco.

Brigham Young was the second president of the Mormon Church and colonizer of Utah. The church's resistance to the application of adjectives law resulted surrounded by conflict with the federal administration during the 1800s. UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD/CORBIS

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