Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe

In the Japanese American relocation camps of World War II, internees could, on any given day, be both clients and victims of their assigned War Relocation Authority lawyers. The morally ambiguous remit of these attorneys was wide and often contradictory, including overseeing the day-to-day administration of the camps, settling internal disputes between inmates, managing conflict between detainees and their government captors, and providing legal representation for prisoners outside of the camps. The lawyers, who largely identified as progressive New Deal liberals, found themselves unwillingly but inevitably complicit in the government's internment of American citizens.

In re-creating the daily lives of these WRA attorneys, Eric L. Muller, a leading expert on Japanese American relocation and internment during World War II, seeks to capture historical subjects as three-dimensional, flawed human beings. Muller adds color, nuance, and pathos to the historical record by creating narrative and dialogue, illustrating how the lawyers' backgrounds, temperaments, circumstances, and personalities shaped their engagements with the unjust system they helped operate. He powerfully illuminates a shameful episode of American history through imaginative narrative grounded in archival evidence.