Joseph Smith's Legal Battles

[UtahDan]

I have just gotten done listening to an absolutely fascinating interview of Morris Thurston on the Mormon Stories Podcast series where he talks about the legal battles of Joseph Smith.

Thurston is an attorney and a Harvard grad who is one of the editors of the "Joseph Smith Papers Project" which is an effort, sponsored in part by the church and in part by Larry H. Miller, to compile all of the papers of the prophet into a single multi-volume set. It is being headed by the church historians office but is drawing on over 50 historians to assist.

As I understand it, this is more of an effort to simply compile the documents, with little if any commentary on them and omitting nothing, and let other scholars do the work from there.

In any case, Thurston's focus is on the legal documents that exist and in the interview he talks about all kinds of interesting things such as the procedure involved (which should really interest the attorneys here) as well as some of the major players (Such as Stephen Douglas) and some interesting people who make cameos (Mary Todd Lincoln). I can't recommend this enough.

http://mormonstories.org/