Eric Muller, professor of law, just wanted a little local color to bring constitutional law to life for his students. Instead, he found an irresistible story and wound up writing a book--Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II.

Teaching at the University of Wyoming in the mid-1990s, Muller covered the leading Supreme Court cases on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. "It was just like ancient history to my students," he said. Since one of the 10 relocation centers was in Wyoming, incorporating it into his lectures seemed a good way to engage his students.

"So, I went to a talk on the center given by a local historian," Muller recalled. "It included a brief mention of the draft resisters, and I thought, `Now that's interesting.'" His curiosity piqued, Muller began to look carefully at the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II. "When I got into the archival materials, the story just grabbed me."

In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans on the West Coast were especially fearful of further attacks. Politicians from California, Oregon and Washington lobbied to have their states' residents of Japanese ancestry removed from their homes and relocated to isolated inland areas. In response to this pressure, President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, which resulted in the forcible internment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry-- two-thirds of whom were American citizens.

Eviction and internment were heavy sacrifices to bear, but, in less than two years, the federal government demanded more. "In January 1944, the government announced that it would begin drafting the very same Japanese American men it was holding behind barbed wire on suspicion of disloyalty," Muller said.

Most of the internees answered their induction orders and served in a segregated combat team the Army created for them. For 300 internees, the draft orders were the final straw, and they refused to report for induction--an act that carried the risk of felony conviction. "These resisters asked the simple moral question that if they're loyal enough to serve in the Army, why hold them behind barbed wire?" Muller said.

"Instead of responding to this question," he said, "the government punished the resisters for asking it--arresting them on charges of draft evasion and carting them off to local jails to await trial." When they came to trial months later, the cases were handled with alarming speed--Judge Chase Clark heard the cases of 33 resisters from the Minidoka Relocation Center in only 11 days.

In his book, Muller artfully weaves legal analysis with the stories of resisters--men like Gene Akutsu of Seattle. By the time Akutsu received his induction orders, he had spent almost two years at Minidoka in southern Idaho. "His father had been seized by the FBI the day after Pearl Harbor and held, without formal charges, as an enemy alien in a Justice Department camp until late 1943," Muller said.

"During his trial, Akutsu struggled to mount his own defense while his court-appointed lawyer stood idly at the back of the courtroom," Muller said. "His effort was in vain because Judge Clark instructed the jury to disregard his testimony on his treatment by the government." Akutsu and the other Minidoka resisters were convicted and, after sentencing in the fall of 1944, sent to prison, where they languished until April 1947.

One judge, Louis Goodman of San Francisco, couldn't bring himself to convict the internees whose cases he heard in Eureka, Calif. In his opinion he wrote that it was "shocking to the conscience that an American citizen be confined on the ground of disloyalty, and then, while so under duress and restraint, be compelled to serve in the armed forces or be prosecuted for not yielding to such compulsion."

Goodman was courageous but not foolish. Keenly aware of local animosity toward Japanese Americans, he waited until the last possible moment to deliver his opinion and had a car idling outside the courthouse, ready to spirit him to San Francisco and safety.

A riveting story wasn't the only hook for Muller. "As I delved into the research and spoke with surviving resisters, I realized that this story had some really strong overtones of my own family history," he said. Muller's family is German Jewish, and his grandfather was interned in Buchenwald, terrorized and released. The family emigrated first to Switzerland and then to the United States, arriving mere months before Pearl Harbor.

His family's dream of assimilation became more challenging after Pearl Harbor. Much like the Japanese Americans' experience, they changed from immigrants to enemy aliens in the eyes of the federal government. "They had to register with the FBI, and the FBI searched their house, seizing a camera and binoculars," Muller said. "The book begins and ends on a personal note because this story and the era touch a lot of chords in me--some of which are full of family pain," Muller said. The nature of the story and its reverberations meant writing the book wasn't all sweetness and light. "But it was a powerful experience to take the stories told to me by men for whom I came to feel a lot of fondness and feel that I had captured the import of those stories."

Writing the book transformed Muller's scholarship. "Before this, my writing was strictly analytical," he said. "Now my mind turns toward understanding legal history from the perspectives of people who experienced it."