I’ve been re-reading Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling , and I just finished the chapter on the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon. When reading about the witnesses of the Book of Mormon, I recognized an interesting parallel to the early Norse and Anglo-Saxon origins of English Common Law that I had not noticed previously and thought I’d write a little about it.

The Classicist bent of our modern American education system often focuses on the real, but overemphasized contribution of the Greek and Roman civilizations to our modern legal system and government while unduly minimizing or ignoring the contribution from the medieval legal traditions of the Norse and Germanic cultures from which English Common law, and subsequently American law, developed.