In The Atlantic: Brief by Professor Oman and Other Scholars Offers Mormon Experience as Cautionary Tale in Travel Ban Case
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).
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Garrett Epps writing in The Atlantic on April 16, highlights three briefs filed in Trump v. Hawaii in an article titled "The Travel Ban's Ignominious Precedents.” Among them, a brief filed in March by religious studies scholars that was written by William & Mary Law Professor Nathan B. Oman that recounts the effort to exclude nineteenth century Mormon immigrants. The group previously filed a version of this brief in litigation over the travel ban in the Ninth Circuit, as well as in the previous travel ban case in the Supreme Court which was subsequently dismissed as moot.
“The most impressive thing about the Mormonism scholars’ brief, to me, is its modesty,” writes Epps in the April 16 essay. “The scholars don’t support either party; all they ask is that, this time, the justices make the government show real evidence that Trump’s Proclamation is aimed at some genuine danger rather than generalized fears of Islam: …”
Nathan B. Oman is the Rollins Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Markets. 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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