Eric L. Muller

Areas of Expertise

• Civil Rights and Discrimination
• Constitutional Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Leadership
• Legal Biography
• Legal Education
• Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility
• Legal History
• Legal Profession
• Military, War, and Peace
• National Security Law
• Race and the Law
• Supreme Court of the United States

Biography

Eric Muller, Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics, is an award-winning teacher and internationally recognized expert on the removal and imprisonment of people of Japanese ancestry in the United States from 1942 to 1946.

He has published four books on the incarceration of Japanese Americans: “Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America’s World War II Concentration Camps” (UNC Press 2023); “Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II” (UNC Press 2012) (winner of the Western History Association’s Joan Patterson Kerr Book Award in 2013); “American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II” (UNC Press 2007); and “Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II” (U of Chicago Press 2001). He has also published articles on this and other subjects in many academic journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Texas Law Review, and the North Carolina Law Review.

In 2018, Muller released “Scapegoat Cities,” a storytelling podcast documenting the wartime experiences of Japanese Americans through untold narratives uncovered in government archives. Earlier, in 2011, Muller curated the award-winning core historical exhibit at the Heart Mountain WWII Japanese American Confinement Site  in northwestern Wyoming.

He joined the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill in 1998 after four years as an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law, four years as an Assistant US Attorney in the Criminal Appeals Division of the US Attorney’s Office in Newark, NJ, two years as an attorney at a New York law firm, and a year’s clerkship with federal district judge H. Lee Sarokin of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey. He received his JD from Yale Law School in 1987 and his BA from Brown University in 1984.

Students at the University of Wyoming College of Law and the UNC School of Law voted Muller the outstanding teacher in 1997, 2010, and 2011.

Muller has a lengthy record of institutional service at UNC Chapel Hill. From 2008 through 2011, he served as Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the law school, and then went on to direct UNC’s campus-wide faculty development center, the Center for Faculty Excellence, from 2012 through 2015. From 2009 to 2021, he served on the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina Press, the last six of them as its chair. He served six years as an elected member of UNC’s Faculty Executive Committee and six on the university’s Appointments, Promotion, and Tenure Committee, the last of them as its chair.

Since 2011, Muller has served as a faculty member with the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, a program that fosters development of young professionals through a deep encounter with the culpability of German professionals for the development and implementation of the Nazi state between 1933 and 1945. In 2018, he became the organization’s Academic Director.

Education

• J.D., Yale University (1987)
• A.B., Brown University (1984)

Selected Publications

Of Coercion and Accommodation: Looking at Japanese American Imprisonment through a Law Office Window, 35 LAW & HIST. REV. 277 (2017).
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | SSRN | Hein

COLORS OF CONFINEMENT: RARE KODACHROME PHOTOGRAPHS OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION IN WORLD WAR II (with photographs by Bill Manbo) (UNC Press, 2012)
D769.8.A6 M327 2012

Hirabayashi and the Invasion Evasion, 88 N.C. L. REV. 1333 (2010).
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | SSRN | Hein | BEPress

Judging Thomas Ruffin and the Hindsight Defense, 87 N.C. L. REV. 757 (2009).
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | SSRN | Hein | BEPress

AMERICAN INQUISITION: THE HUNT FOR JAPANESE AMERICAN DISLOYALTY IN WORLD WAR II (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
D769.8.A6 M85 2007

Betrayal on Trial: Japanese-American "Treason" in World War II, 82 N.C. L. REV. 1759 (2004).
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | Hein | BEPress

FREE TO DIE FOR THEIR COUNTRY: THE STORY OF THE JAPANESE AMERICAN DRAFT RESISTERS IN WORLD WAR II (University of Chicago Press, 2001, paperback 2003).
D810.C82 M85 2001

The Hobgoblin of Little Minds? Our Foolish Law of Inconsistent Verdicts, 111 HARV. L. REV. 771 (1998).
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | SSRN | Hein

Solving the Batson Paradox: Harmless Error, Jury Representation, and the Sixth Amendment, 106 YALE L.J. 93 (1996).
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | SSRN | Hein | BEPress