Professor Oman Among Mormon Scholars Who File Brief in Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project
Professor Nathan B. Oman Professor Oman studies Mormon legal history and is the Rollins Professor of Law at William & Mary. His most recent scholarship includes "The Dignity of Commerce: Markets and the Moral Foundations of Contract Law" (University of Chicago Press 2017).
Professor Nathan B. Oman of William & Mary Law School and Anna-Rose Mathieson of the California Appellate Group LLP wrote a brief signed by 21 scholars of law and Mormon history filed Thursday in the U.S. Supreme Court attacking President Trump’s ban on immigrants and refugees from six Muslim nations.
The brief and the scholars’ announcement regarding the brief can be found on this website.
The brief does not take a position on the lawfulness of the President’s March 6, 2017 Executive Order. Rather, the amici seek to draw the Court’s attention to unsettling parallels they found between the current ban and religious discrimination against Mormons in immigration in the 19th century. “If the Executive Order does target Muslims for disfavored treatment,” they noted, “then the history of the government’s mistreatment of Mormons suggests it could take decades—if not longer—to undo the damage that official action would cause to both America’s body politic and the place of Muslims in our society.”
Nineteen of the scholars filed a brief in April in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in State of Hawaii v. Trump.
Nathan B. Oman is the Rollins Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School. He graduated from Brigham Young University, where he was a Benson Scholar, and, prior to law school, worked on the staff of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Morris Shepard Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and worked as a litigation associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley Austin, LLP. Professor Oman earned his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he served on the Articles Committee of the Harvard Law Review and as an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. His most recent scholarship includes The Dignity of Commerce: Markets and the Moral Foundations of Contract Law (University of Chicago Press 2017).
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