{"id":550,"date":"2022-02-01T11:00:04","date_gmt":"2022-02-01T16:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/july-2022\/?p=550"},"modified":"2024-02-07T13:20:46","modified_gmt":"2024-02-07T18:20:46","slug":"lawyer-jailer-ally-foe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/lawyer-jailer-ally-foe\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Eric Muller\u2019s Newest Book Tells the Story of Lawyers Who Ran America&#8217;s WW II Concentration Camps and  How They Reconciled Their Actions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe | Book Trailer | UNC School of Law\" width=\"798\" height=\"449\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qlIhWci7HIw?start=59&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>By Michele Lynn<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As one of the leading scholars on the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/law.unc.edu\/people\/eric-l-muller\/\" target=\"_blank\">Eric Muller<\/a> has spent decades researching and writing about the injustices suffered by these American citizens. In his recent book, <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/uncpress.org\/book\/9781469673974\/lawyer-jailer-ally-foe\/\" target=\"_blank\">Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America\u2019s World War II Concentration Camps,<\/a> <\/em>Muller focuses his moral compass on three of the white lawyers who worked as project attorneys for the War Relocation Authority, the civilian agency charged with handling the detention camps. These attorneys&nbsp;provided legal counsel to camp prisoners while also keeping the camp running. Muller explores how Jerry Housel at Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Ted Haas at Poston in Arizona, and James Hendrick Terry at Gila River in Arizona\u2014as well as Japanese American prisoner-lawyer Thomas Masuda, who worked alongside Hass\u2014balanced their professional ethics with their day-to-day responsibilities which perpetuated racial injustice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Muller, the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at UNC School of Law, was first exposed to the story of Japanese American removal and imprisonment during his first teaching job, at the University of Wyoming College of Law between 1994 and 1998. \u201cWhile teaching a very famous case, <em>Korematsu v. United States<\/em>, that emerged from this chapter of history, I found that my students\u2014who were almost exclusively from Wyoming\u2014had no idea that this was their own history,\u201d says Muller, noting that one of the 10 detention camps was in northwest Wyoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Years later, Muller\u2019s role as a faculty member of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), prompted him to think about the role that attorneys played in reinforcing the internment system. FASPE, an educational nonprofit, provides fellowships to American and international graduate students in professional schools and to early-career professionals to travel Europe on a two-week study trip to focus on how the professions in Nazi Germany in the 1930s were instrumental in the construction of the Nazi State. \u201cWe use those examples of Nazi perpetrator professionals to encourage reflection among young, professionals about their own choices and the power that they hold,\u201d says Muller. \u201cI came to see the range of discretion that American lawyers had, during World War II, to participate in this developing system, resist it in small ways, or to change it from within.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Muller began his research for this book project, he wondered how lawyers could reconcile themselves to running internment camps. In reading the attorneys\u2019 voluminous correspondence\u2014biweekly letters to the home office, documenting in rich detail their actions, thoughts, and feelings\u2014Muller saw that the lawyers understood the immorality of the detention program and the loyalty of the Japanese American population. He says that he was initially convinced that the attorneys should have quit and worked against the system from the outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But his views were transformed through his research as he came to see the amount of discretion the lawyers had in defining their jobs. Housel, Haas, and Terry helped the prisoners and positively influenced other white administrators in the camps. \u201cI came to see the range of good and bad that these lawyers were able to do,\u201d says Muller. \u201cIt became clear to me that there is a role within bad systems for people trying to make them better or trying to prevent them from going further off the rails.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He says that these are important roles for professionals to play, as long as they have certain lines that they won\u2019t cross. \u201cIf lawyers commit to being reflective and asking themselves whether they have slipped too far into something that they disapprove of, then there\u2019s a role for them in these kinds of systems,\u201d says Muller. \u201cDuring this project, I developed a different vision of roles that professionals can play that have value and are positive even if the system itself is overall a major injustice, as this one was.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe <\/em>differs from Muller\u2019s previous books because he employs a novelistic style in this volume. Thanks to visits to the camps, contemporary newspapers published in the camps, interviews with some of the attorneys\u2019 descendants, and particularly the vast epistolary evidence, Muller developed a strong personal sense of the attorneys. In his book, he created dialogue for the men based on their writing and the writing about them, to give readers a sense of them as people. As Muller observes in the book\u2019s preface, \u201cUnjust systems are mostly run not by moral monsters but by ordinary people like us, people with plausible, self-comforting stories to tell about tempering evil.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While the book does not focus on the Japanese American prisoners themselves, it captures&nbsp;a slice of their lives that has mostly gone undocumented. As Muller notes, people go to lawyers because they\u2019re having problems. \u201cWhen an oral historian asks questions of former detainees, people might not say, \u2018That\u2019s where I got divorced,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cBut these were human beings on whom a terrible injustice was being perpetuated, who were cooped up and confined in these very difficult surroundings so their lives included the types of things in which lawyers would need to be involved. This book opens up another little window on the lives of the prisoners.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While Muller hopes for a diverse readership for this book, he has reached out to law firms to bring this story to their attorneys through virtual book clubs and discussions. He says, \u201cI think that the sharpest ethical questions will emerge specifically for lawyer readers who will look at these stories and be able to say, \u2018What would I have done if I had had this job? and \u2018Is there anything about what I do in my current job that reminds me of some of the dilemmas that these guys were facing?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As one of the leading scholars on the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II, Eric Muller has spent decades researching and writing about the injustices suffered by these American citizens. In his recent book, Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America\u2019s World War II Concentration Camps, Muller focuses his moral compass on three of the white lawyers who worked as project attorneys for the War Relocation Authority, the civilian agency charged with handling the detention camps. These attorneys provided legal counsel to camp prisoners while also keeping the camp running. Muller explores how Jerry Housel at Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Ted Haas at Poston in Arizona, and James Hendrick Terry at Gila River in Arizona\u2014as well as Japanese American prisoner-lawyer Thomas Masuda, who worked alongside Hass\u2014balanced their professional ethics with their day-to-day responsibilities which perpetuated racial injustice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1611,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2009,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550\/revisions\/2009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.law.unc.edu\/february-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}