I come to Professor David Luban’s incisive Complicity and Lesser Evils not as a historian, philosopher, legal scholar, or professional ethicist, but rather as a practitioner. As someone whose tenure as a career attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) covered the first two years of the Trump administration, I read Professor Luban’s article with unsettling, if not surprising, recognition. Building on Hannah Arendt’s work, Professor Luban perceptively captures the challenges my colleagues and I faced when deciding whether to stay and work within a terrible regime or to “just go home.”

Keep Reading