Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe

Complicity and Conscience in America's World War II Concentration Camps

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Pub Date 16 May 2023 | Archive Date 25 Apr 2023

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Description

It is 1942, and World War II is raging. In the months since Pearl Harbor, the US has plunged into the war overseas – and on the home front, has locked up tens of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans in concentration camps, tearing them from their homes on the West Coast with the ostensible goal of neutralizing a supposed internal threat.

At each of these camps the government places a white lawyer with contradictory instructions: provide legal counsel to the prisoners, but keep the place running. Within that job description is a vast array of tasks, and an enormous amount of discretion they can use for good or for ill. They fight to protect the property the prisoners were forced to leave behind on the coast; they help the prisoners with their wills and taxes; and they interrogate them about their loyalties, sometimes to the point of tears. Most think of themselves as trying to do good in a bad system, and yet each ends up harming the prisoners more than helping them, complicit in a system that strips people of their freedoms and sometimes endangers their lives.

In Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe, historian Eric L. Muller brings to vivid life the stories of three of these men, illuminating a shameful episode of American history through imaginative narrative deeply grounded in archival evidence. As we look through the lawyers’ sometimes clear and sometimes clouded eyes, what emerges is a powerful look at the day-by-day, brick-by-brick perpetration of racial injustice—not just by the system itself, but by the men struggling to do good within it.

Eric L. Muller is the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor of Law in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

It is 1942, and World War II is raging. In the months since Pearl Harbor, the US has plunged into the war overseas – and on the home front, has locked up tens of thousands of innocent Japanese...


Advance Praise

"Muller has built a series of stories of novelistic detail and craft—he's got a gift for storytelling—that's firmly anchored in the primary sources and focused on life in the camps." —Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

"The questions Muller raises can be applied to anyone who played a role in the forced removal and confinement of Japanese Americans, to the War Relocation Authority in general, and, more broadly, to anyone who takes part in an unjust endeavor, even with the best of intentions." —Brian Niiya, Densho.org

"In a bold experiment in creative historical narration, Eric Muller portrays a complex microcosm in which system-sustaining complicity and an earnest desire to mitigate and ameliorate injustice existed side by side. Drawing on meticulous research into the voluminous collection of biweekly reports submitted by the “project attorneys” assigned to each of the detention camps that held West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II, Muller employs a method of what he calls “responsible extrapolation” to present an informed and plausible picture of the subjective feelings, motivations, and dialogue of three key lawyers who sought to serve their employer—the War Relocation Authority—and help the unjustly interned “evacuees” simultaneously. This is a vital contribution to the historical literature on Japanese American internment." —Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Muller has built a series of stories of novelistic detail and craft—he's got a gift for storytelling—that's firmly anchored in the primary sources and focused on life in the camps." —Kermit...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781469673974
PRICE $30.00 (USD)
PAGES 304

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