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.