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.
Hinckley, Oaks has not spent the bulk of his working life within the Mormon hierarchy. Indeed, unlike Nelson’s immediate predecessors, Thomas S. “Particularly, he is probably most academic thinker about religion and its place in public life,” added Bowman, a history professor at Arkansas’ Henderson State University. “The interesting thing about Oaks is that he comes from an academic 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.
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.Īs 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.
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