“Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe” Now Available as an Audiobook

Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America’s World War II Concentration Camps by Eric L. Muller is now available as an audiobook from Audible, Libro.fm, Kobo and Apple Books. Learn more about the book and listen to a sample of the audiobook below.

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, and keep the place running. Within that job description are 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; they help the prisoners with their wills and taxes; and they interrogate them about their loyalties, sometimes driving them to tears. Most of these lawyers 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, 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.

Praise for Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe

A fascinating and detailed account of one of America’s darkest chapters. Through the eyes and work of three dedicated lawyers we see the struggles of Japanese American citizens stripped of their dignity and rights and locked away simply because of their race.

John Grisham

Vivid. . . . For readers interested in human rights, concentration camps, or the legal history of this period, this is an important work.

Library Journal

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.