Maura I. Strassberg is a law professor at Drake University in Des Moines who has expertise in sexuality law and has written about polygamy.

R. Collin Mangrum is a law professor at Creighton University in Omaha who teaches on church and state issues and on the history of American legal thought. He is co-author of Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (University of Illinois Press, 1988).

Michele Alexandre, an associate law professor at the University of Mississippi, is a 2004 Fulbright Scholar researching the legal protection afforded to women under the Haitian practice of placage, an informal form of polygamy.

O. Kendall White Jr. is William P. Ames Jr. Professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and has written extensively on Mormonism.

Daryl White is a professor of sociology and anthropology at Spelman College in Atlanta who has researched Mormonism.

Patricia Dixon is associate professor in African-American studies at Georgia State University in Athens, Ga., and co-founder of the African-American Relationships Institute. She contends that a shortage of eligible African-American men, combined with men’s natural tendency to engage in multiple relationships, makes polygamy a practical option for African-Americans.

Rick Ross is founder and executive director of the nonprofit Ross A. Institute, which is based in Jersey City, N.J., and has a mission of studying controversial groups and movements. The institute maintains a database on polygamist groups

James J. Hughes is the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, as well as a bioethicist and sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Mary Mackert, a former plural wife who lives in Utah, wrote and published The Sixth of Seven Wives: Escape From Modern-Day Polygamy (xpolygamist.com, 2001).