Dallin H. Oaks - Biographical Background

Biographical Background

Oaks was born in Provo, Utah to Stella Harris and Lloyd E. Oaks. His father, who was an ophthalmologist, died when Dallin was seven years old. Both of Oaks's parents were graduates of BYU. After Oaks's father died his mother pursued a graduate degree at Columbia University and later served as head of adult education for the Provo School District. Stella Harris Oaks also served two terms in the 1950s as a member of the Provo City Council.

Oaks graduated from Brigham Young High School in 1950. While in high school he became a certified radio engineer. He then attended BYU, where he occasionally served as a radio announcer at high school basketball games. It was at one of these basketball games where he met June Dixon, a senior at that high school, whom he would eventually marry. Due to his membership in the Utah National Guard and the threat of being called up to serve in the Korean War, Oaks was unable to serve as a missionary for the LDS Church. In 1952 Oaks married June Dixon in the Salt Lake Temple. He graduated from BYU with a degree in accounting in 1954.

Oaks then went on to the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review. After graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 1957, Oaks clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court from 1957 to 1958. After his clerkship he practiced at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago. Oaks left Kirkland & Ellis to become a professor at the University of Chicago Law School in 1961. During part of his time on the faculty of the Law School, Oaks served as interim dean. He taught primarily in the fields of trust and estate law, as well as gift taxation law. He worked with George Bogert on a new edition of a casebook on trusts. In 1968 he became a founding member of the editorial board of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. One of the articles he wrote for this publication expressed his view that deliberate defiance of the law is never a worthwhile course of action in a democracy. He resigned from Dialogue's editorial board in early 1970. In 1969 Oaks served as chairman of the University of Chicago disciplinary committee. In conducting hearing against those who had been involved in a sit-in at the administration building Oaks was physically attacked twice. During the first half of 1970 Oaks took a leave of absence from the University of Chicago while serving as legal counsel to the Bill of Rights Committee of the Illinois Constitutional Convention, which caused him to work closely with the committee chair, Elmer Gertz. Oaks left the University of Chicago Law School upon being appointed President at Brigham Young University in 1971.

Oaks would also serve five years as chairman of the Board of Directors of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) (1979–1984) and eight years as chairman of the Board of Directors of the Polynesian Cultural Center.