The Rise and Fall of Civil Disputes in Mormon Church Courts: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

A number of American religious denominations - Quakers, Baptists, Mormons, and others - have tried with varying degrees of success to opt out of the secular legal system, resolving civil litigation between church members in church courts. This paper looks at this phenomenon in the Mormon context, asking why Latter-day Saints moved civil disputes into church courts during the nineteenth century and why they abandoned the practice in the early twentieth century. It presents my preliminary research on a much larger project on civil litigation in nineteenth-century Mormon courts.