The History of Nebraska Law — (2008)

Edited by Alan G. Gless

“Every state should have a book like this, and the authors and editors deserve a great deal of credit for adding this one to the four existing volumes in the Law, Society and Politics in the Midwest series.”

Elizabeth Brand Monroe — Indiana Magazine of History

The History of Nebraska Law is the fourth volume of state legal histories in the Ohio University Press Series on Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest. These state legal histories give us a deeper understanding of the history of American law as a whole and a greater appreciation of the contributions of the Midwest to national legal discourse.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, legislators in the Nebraska Territory grappled with the responsibility of forming a state government as well as with the larger issues of reconstructing the Union, protecting civil rights, and redefining federal-state relations. In the years that followed, Nebraskans coped with regional and national economic collapses. Nebraska women struggled for full recognition in the legal profession. Meyer v. Nebraska, a case involving a teacher in a one-room rural Nebraska schoolhouse, changed the course of American constitutional doctrine and remains one of the cornerstones of civil liberties law. And Roscoe Pound, a boy from Lincoln, went on to become one of the nation’s great legal philosophers.

Much of Nebraska law reflects mainstream American law, yet Nebraskans have been open to experiment and innovation. The state revamped the legislative process by establishing the nation’s only unicameral legislature and pioneered public employment collective bargaining and dispute resolution through its commission of industrial relations and relaxation of strict separation of powers.

Nebraska holds a prominent position in the field of Native American legal history, and the state’s original inhabitants have been at the center of many significant developments in federal Indian policy. Nebraska Indian legal history is replete with stories of failure and success, triumph and heartache, hope and misery, suffering, and hardship.