"Chewing on It" in Nebraska

In the Old West, judges rode the circuit on horseback with two indispensable tools of justice in their saddlebags: a copy of Blackstone's Commentaries and a flask of whisky. Today Judge Robert Moran, 52, travels the five counties of Nebraska's 16th judicial district in a battered 1972 Plymouth with 140,000 miles on it (his 1960 model died at 240,000). His tools are two loose-leaf binders with summaries of his case docket and a black bag stuffed with lawyer's briefs. His territory is his state's western panhandle. It is sparse ranch and farm country, though railroads hauling low-sulfur coal have made the local junction, Alliance (pop. 10,000), a boom town. The mean Midwest weather that Judge Moran encounters has not changed since Lawyer Abraham Lincoln rode Illinois' Eight Circuit. Carl Sandburg described it: "Mean was the journey in the mud of spring thaws, in the blowing sleet or snow and icy winds of winter."

The law has changed a great deal, and Moran's district court is the court of original jurisdiction for most serious criminal and civil cases. Just keeping abreast of the law means that Moran constantly reads as his driver, court reporter and general assistant, Mike Benitez, 22, ferries him from county to county, some 1,700 miles a month. In only a few days, in three different courts, Moran will change some child visitation rights, grant half a dozen divorces, hear pretrial motions on a first-degree murder charge, listen to motions on a complex home-construction case, sentence a drunken driver, a housebreaker and a cocaine peddler (90 days' probation). The legal issues and questions he constantly confronts hop from civil to criminal to constitutional.

When some American Indian activists occupied a building at Fort Robinson and threatened to burn it down, Moran sentenced them to five days in the county jail. Some whites denounced him for being a "bit soft on our Indian brethren," But in Moran's view, "shorn of emotionalism, what happened is nothing more than a slightly aggravated case of trespass."

In another case he heard the murder trial of two white youths for beating an Indian who later died of brain damage. When Moran sentenced the boys--six years for the leader, two years for the other --some Indians were furious and tore down the American flag outside the courthouse.

The judge's reasoning: the Indian's death was a "senseless act of hooliganism which was not intended to be criminal."

Though Moran knows all the lawyers who come before him, he keeps his distance.

His regular golf game with an Alliance lawyer ended when he had to rule on a close case in his friend's favor.

Moran, who has been on the bench for twelve years, is known for running a strict court; with 450 cases a year, he has to. "The way to irritate Moran," says the judge about himself, "is to ask for continuances." He is a one-man show: he does all his own legal research and wrestles with his hard decisions alone. "I can't bounce things off other people to help me," he says. "A judge lives a fairly lonely life." A practicing Roman Catholic, he has eight children. Child custody cases leave him drained. "We are asked to play God in these cases, and you can't be God. The touchstone is 'the best interests of the child.' Isn't that a lovely phrase? What does it mean?" Criminal sentencing sometimes sends him walking around town, "chewing on it like a dog with a bone. You drop it and pick it up again and chew on it."

Yet Moran clearly relishes his job. "I'm miserably happy with it," he says. As he drives around his district, he loves to tell of applying the law to life in the panhandle. He recalls the case of a thief who stole some unbranded cattle, put his brand on them and rustled them off to North Dakota.

The owner pursued and identified his own cattle. But how, Moran asked, could he identify them? "Well," the man replied, "I just went up there and called out their names and they came right to me." Moran smiles broadly retelling the story. "You know, I went home that night and looked up the case law on identifying animals by their names, and there it all was."

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