A Conversation with Eric L. Muller, Author of Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America’s WWII Concentration Camps

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, it 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.  

In Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe, 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.