Eric Muller, Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at UNC School of Law, 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 received his bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from Brown University in 1984 and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1987.

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.

From 2011 to 2023, Muller 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. From 2018 to 2024, he served as the organization’s Academic Director.