Would the Big Bad Wolf prevail in his tort claim for damages that he filed against Curly Pig after he was injured falling into a vat of boiling water at Pig’s home? One hundred fifth-graders from OPS’s Liberty Elementary School watched the (mock) trial held in their gym, with 12 of them serving as jurors, at the Omaha Bar Association’s 2019 Law Day Mock Trial. 

Journalists might take for granted their right to report utterances made in open court, but they have the organized efforts of Nebraska me­dia outlets to thank for a landmark Supreme Court decision establish­ing that right.

The media coalition came togeth­er to fight a North Platte judge’s or­der in 1975 to stop the publication and broadcasting of accounts of a confession or other facts “strongly implicative” of guilt in a Sutherland murder case.

It’s a subject Danielle Conrad and Amy Miller often find themselves addressing, but let’s be clear: Free speech needs to be defended.

It’s true, and somewhat surpris­ing, that an organization which has been around 99 years – and for more than 50 years in Nebraska – the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) often is more than a little understood.

Miller, the ACLU Nebraska’s le­gal director, feels the con­fusion stems from people not under­standing the organization is nonparti­san.