Dallin Oaks, '57: Russell M. Nelson, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Picked Oaks to be his First Counselor in the Governing First Presidency

As Nelson’s longtime right-hand man, Oaks brings a keen legal mind to Mormonism’s new Big Three

January 16, 2018 The Salt Lake Tribune

For nearly 34 years, Dallin H. Oaks has been at Russell M. Nelson’s side — in solemn meetings at the Salt Lake Temple, during intense policy discussions at LDS Church headquarters and for public appearances in Mormon General Conferences.

There they always were. The lawyer and the doctor. The judge and the surgeon. The apostle and the ... apostle.

That close association will continue after Nelson, newly ordained and set apart by his fellow apostles as the 17th president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, picked his longtime colleague to be his first counselor in the governing First Presidency (Henry B. Eyring is second counselor).

Nelson, who became a renowned heart surgeon, and Oaks, a former Utah Supreme Court justice, even were called to the Mormon apostleship on the same day in 1984, but the former was ordained about a month earlier.

As such, the 85-year-old Oaks, a former president of LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University and next in line to succeed the 93-year-old Nelson, is well prepared after having served more than three decades in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

“The interesting thing about Oaks is that he comes from an academic [legal] background,” said LDS historian Matthew Bowman, author of “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.” “That has made him sort of the point man in church leadership for complex issues of the law.

“Particularly, he is probably [the leadership’s] most academic thinker about religion and its place in public life,” added Bowman, a history professor at Arkansas’ Henderson State University.

Indeed, unlike Nelson’s immediate predecessors, Thomas S. Monson and Gordon B. Hinckley, Oaks has not spent the bulk of his working life within the Mormon hierarchy. Before his apostolic appointment, Oaks already had built a legacy and reputation as a professor, attorney and jurist possessed of a keen, deliberative legal mind.

He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren in 1957-58 and practiced law in Illinois before accepting a professorship at the University of Chicago Law School in 1961.