Firmage, Edwin Brown

Edwin Brown Firmage (b. 1935) is a former professor of international and constitutional law at the University of Utah. Firmage won many awards and honors for his humanitarian crusades, including Utah Edowment for the Humanities Governor's Award, the University of Utah Distinguished Teaching Award, the Charles Redd Prize, and many others. He served as a White House Fellow under Hubert H. Humphrey where he had the opportunity to work with Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Dahli Lama. He was also a United Nations visiting scholar to the East, he ran for Congress in 1978, and was a Fulbright scholar in 1990.

From the guide to the Edwin Brown Firmage papers, 1780-2011, (J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

Edwin Brown Firmage (b.1935) teaches constitutional law and international law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law in Salt Lake City, Utah. A Hinckley Fellow at Brigham Young University (BYU), he graduated with high honors in political science and history before earning his Master of Arts. He was National Honors Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School and served on the editorial board of the Chicago Law Review. He received the doctor of law, master of laws, and doctor of jurisprudence degrees from Chicago.

Dr. Firmage served as a White House Fellow on the staff of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, with responsibility for civil rights. In that capacity, he worked with Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He also served as United Nations Visiting Scholar, and attended sessions of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York and the arms control negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1970-71.

He served as Fellow in Law and Humanities at the Harvard Law School in 1974-75. He received the University of Utah Distinguished Teaching Award in 1977 and the Brigham Young University Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award in 1978.

The University of Utah invited Dr. Firmage to deliver the annual Reynolds Lecture, Ends and Means in Conflict, in October 1987. In 1988, Professor Firmage was awarded the Charles Redd Prize by the Utah Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, for outstanding contributions in the humanities and social sciences during the past five years. Professor Firmage was the recipient of the 1989 Governor's Award in the Humanities, given by the Utah Endowment for the Humanities.

He delivered the McDougall lecture, Reconciliation, at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 7, 1989. With the late Francis Wormuth, he wrote To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law, second edition published in 1989 by University of Illinois Press.

Professor Firmage's book with Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the first legal history of the Mormon experience in the nineteenth century, was awarded the 1989 first place prize of the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Awards for the best book of the year, given by the Honors Society of the National Association of Jesuit Colleges & Universities in the United States.

His book, Religion and Law: Biblical, Jewish and Islamic Perspectives, was written with J. Welch and B. Weiss, eds., (Eisenbraun's 1990). Professor Firmage was named Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law by the University of Utah in January 1990. He was a participant in a Fulbright Seminar in the Soviet Union during the summer of 1990, traveling throughout the country, attending lectures and meetings with Soviet governmental leaders, scholars, and leaders of emerging political parties.

He worked with Vietnamese refugees in Vietnam, Thailand and Hong Kong in 1990 and 1991. Dr. Firmage was the 1991 recipient of the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the highest academic award given by the University of Utah. In 1991 he was also awarded the Turner-Fairbourn Award for significant contributions to peace and justice. He delivered the Lane Lecture at Creighton University School of Law, Omaha Nebraska, 1992. Professor Firmage was a visiting professor August-December, 1992, Bentham House, University College, University of London. He taught Constitutional Law. In April of 1993, Professor Firmage gave lectures to the justice and peace representatives of the International Congregation of Men and Women Religious in Rome.

Professor Firmage delivered the Kellogg Lectures in May of 1993, entitled <The Human Being: War, Peace and Faith, at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Covey Oliver and Edwin B. Firmage, et al., are editors of The International Legal System, Fourth Edition, Foundation Press, New York, Spring, 1995.

Dr. Firmage attended the meetings of the Subcommission on Human Rights of the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland, during the month of August, 1999. His speech at the Sub-Commission began debate on the topic "Toward the Creation of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence Toward Children, 2000-2010."

Following the Geneva meetings Professor Firmage enjoyed a personal audience with His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, in Dharamsala, India, and later had extensive meetings with the Tibetan government-in-exile, and including members of the cabinet, legislative leaders of the government, and the Tibetan Supreme Justice Commission, on matters of constitutional revision and international relations, in September and again in November, 1999. Professor Firmage teaches constitutional law at the University of Utah.

Hugh B. Brown (1883-1975) was one of the most popular twentieth-century Mormon leaders, as well as an attorney, educator, and author. Born on October 24 1883 to Homer Manley and Lydia Jane Brown in Granger Utah, he was fifteen when his family moved to Alberta, Canada.

Brown went to England as a missionary, serving from 1904 to 1906. Upon returning from his missionary experiences, Brown married Zina Young Card in 1908. The couple settled in Alberta, Canada where the first six of their eight children were born. In 1912 Brown undertook military training preliminary to organizing a Latter-day Saint contingent for the Canadian armed reserves. By 1917 Brown had achieved the rank of major in the Canadian military. The Imperial military significantly influenced Brown, as shown in accounts of his service in his later writing, but he ultimately turned away from a military career. Upon returning from World War I, Brown's Canadian vocations included stints as cowboy, farmer, soldier, businessman, and head of the LDS Lethbridge Stake.

Brown had studied at the Law Society of Alberta prior to his military service. Renewing an interest in law, he began working with Z. W. Jacobs, a Cardston barrister. Completing a five-year apprenticeship while working a farm he had purchased near Cardston, Brown passed the bar examination and was admitted to the bar in 1921. Moving to Salt Lake City in 1927, Brown quickly became a successful lawyer and president of the LDS Granite Stake. He also formed a lifelong allegiance with the Democratic party, which led to an unsuccessful run for political office and an unpleasant term of service as first chairman of Utah's Liquor Control Commission from 1935 to 1937.

A call to head the LDS British Mission came soon, the first of many full-time church positions which brought him admiration and influence, but never the affluence for which he also yearned. As LDS Servicemen's Coordinator from 1941 to 1945, he traveled extensively in North America and western Europe as de facto chief chaplain for the thousands of Mormons in American, British, and Commonwealth uniforms; anecdotes born of this experience punctuated his sermons and writings thereafter. Early in 1944 he was given an additional appointment to reactivate the British Mission.

Intervals as a professor of religion at Brigham Young University (1946-1949), and with an Alberta oil prospecting firm (1949-1953), preceded his call, at age seventy, to be one of the LDS General Authorities - an Assistant to the Council of the Twelve. Thereafter he became a member of the Council of the Twelve in 1958, and Counselor to and then Second Counselor in the First Presidency in 1961, becoming First Counselor in 1963. His record of earlier service, his effective writings and sermons, and his long friendship and ideological affinity with LDS Church President David O. McKay probably accounted for his rapid advancement in the church hierarchy. McKay's failing health and his own policy differences within the church leadership later weakened Brown's influence, though his popularity remained great. Following McKay's death in 1970, he served in the Council of the Twelve until his own death, two years after Zina's, on 2 December 1975.

From the guide to the Edwin Brown Firmage audio-visual collection, 1968-1969, 1996-2001, (J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)