Seven small-business owners operating 30 tanning salons in the Omaha and Lincoln areas brought a lawsuit against the Nebraska Cancer Coalition in 2015 in response to its anti-tanning bed campaign “The Bed is Dead,” according to the Lincoln Journal Star.
Through their skin cancer awareness initiative, the NCC digitally published several statements about the link between artificial ultra-violet light exposure and an increased risk of melanoma, or skin cancer.
Further reported by the Lincoln Journal Star, the plaintiffs of the lawsuit, also members of the American Suntanning Association, claimed defamation and violation of the Nebraska Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
According to online law platform Justia, the Nebraska Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the plaintiffs’ appeal in 2019, ruling that the statements made by the NCC under its anti-tanning bed campaign were neither directed at any specific product sold by the tanning salon owners nor were they defamatory in nature.
Free speech is protected from government interference under the First Amendment, but what happens when public participation results in litigation at the state level?
Strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs, like the case mentioned above may be filed as defamation, nuisance, invasion of privacy or other claims, according to the Uniform Law Commission.
A SLAPP’s purpose, however, is to intimidate and silence defendants from engaging in free speech involving public concern by means of expensive litigation.
Pat Janssen, assistant professor of mass communications at Wayne State College, said it’s a tactic people with power use to express power over those trying to hold them to account.
“The purpose of a SLAPP is basically just trying to put a monetary barrier between people seeking information for the general public in order to prevent them from being able to do so, because most journalists and honestly most journalistic outlets don’t have the money to fight these frivolous lawsuits or pay a lot of money for what should be publicly available information,” Janssen said.
Several states have legislation in place to help protect the public’s right to free speech by imposing safeguards against SLAPP suits.
Thirteen states have enacted the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act proposed by the Uniform Law Commision, providing “a clear process to challenge a SLAPP and quickly dismiss a claim without merit,” and nine additional states including Nebraska have introduced the act as a bill in legislature, according to the ULC.
While Nebraska already has anti-SLAPP legislation, the Institute for Free Speech gave the cornhusker state a “D-” grade on its 2025 anti-SLAPP report card due to its narrow protections, according to the IFS.
“If you look at Nebraska’s laws on the books, you could maybe say there’s loosely one law relating to anti-SLAPP, but that’s a pretty loose interpretation, because it has a really narrow scope really related to petitions,” Janssen said. “So, I would argue there’s not really any actual anti-SLAPP legislation on the books in Nebraska.”
Danielle Conrad, senator of Nebraska’s 46th district, introduced the ULC’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act as LB 493 on Jan. 21, 2025, according to Nebraska Legislature.
The bill was referred to and discussed in judiciary committee on Feb. 27, 2025, but has yet to move further in the legislative process.
Conrad introduced the same act during the last biennium under a different bill number that had been indefinitely postponed.
“I became aware of this policy when I was leading a civil rights organization and we utilized the law to advance human rights and were threatened with SLAPP suits by powerful actors,” Conrad said. “Nebraska’s existing protections offered some measure of defense but need to be updated.”
Conrad said she believes that with emerging intolerances to free speech on both the right and the left, political actors are using the courts to stifle unpopular political expression.
“This is a nonpartisan non-political issue that is about justice and good governance and updating our legal framework to protect, not chill, free expression,” Conrad said.
There were seven proponents and one opponent of LB 493 at its hearing in judiciary committee on February 27, according to the committee transcript.
The opponent to the bill represented the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office which advocated for an amendment to the bill to include “an express and broad exemption to attorneys general, county attorneys and district attorneys” to prevent actors from hindering “critical litigation by government entities to vindicate the public interest.” Conrad said the bill will carry over into the next legislative session.
“I will keep working on it but believe that a majority of senators on the committee who are closely aligned with the attorney general care little about strengthening the law or preventing abuses of power on behalf of the most vulnerable, and thus, it will be hard to advance the bill in the upcoming session,” Conrad said.
Conrad said the attorney general’s opposition is not credible and stands in sharp contrast to the experiences in our sister states and is not supported by national and local legal experts.
“Attorney General Hilgers’ motives in opposing this measure are cynical, dangerous, and disappointing,” Conrad said. “He seeks only to bolster existing loopholes in the law that allow him and other powerful actors to abuse their power at the expense of the most vulnerable.”
“A prime example as to how the attorney general has abused his power is how he has chosen to harass and bankrupt citizens who successfully petitioned their government for change on sensible medical marijuana laws supported by over 70 percent of Nebraska voters, yet he uses every resource in his office to threaten and bury them with a flurry of ongoing civil and criminal actions, chilling free expression and the right to petition your government which are sacred rights in a democracy,” Conrad said.
Iterating the importance of free expression, Janssen said it is vital to the maintenance of a democratic society.
“Journalism at its best serves as a watchdog to help protect members of society, and it’s not just politics but also corporations that have an outside influence on communities, on the country, on government,” Jansen said. “So, anybody who’s got a large amount of influence and a large amount of money and are not able to be held to account, that serves as the start of the crumbling of society as we know it.”
Jenny Miller, assistant professor of political science at Wayne State College, also agreed that free speech is one of the fundamental protections we have in order to keep the government in check.
“I believe that was what the founders really emphasized with freedom of speech, the ability to speak out without being punished or penalized, certainly without being jailed or imprisoned or something like that, and we had tests of that early on in our history particularly, but it’s really essential for us to be able to actually talk about hard things, contentious things,” Miller said.
Miller said having the open environment for that discussion allows people to be exposed to those ideas and develop their own understandings and push back when they find ideas that are offensive and harmful.
“Without having that space to have those discussions, without having free speech, we could very much be in a different place, and I think that those protections are really important,” Miller said.
