In October, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation will begin a three-year program to train graduate students in law, journalism and business about professional ethics in times of crisis in coordination with Professor Eric Muller of the University of North Carolina Law School. 

Muller, an accomplished author who helped develop the permanent exhibit at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, will build on a successful pilot seminar for law students that Muller led at Heart Mountain in 2024. 

The seminars will explore the ethical challenges that members of each profession have faced in times of political and national crisis, particularly regarding the rights of communities subjected to discrimination. Muller’s latest book, Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America's World War II Concentration Camps, examines how lawyers working for the War Relocation Authority navigated the multiple conflicts of interests in representing the government and Japanese Americans incarcerated in a series of camps around the country.

The seminar for law students follows recent changes to the American Bar Association’s accreditation standards to require law schools to offer students “substantial opportunities ... for the development of a professional identity.” The program also uses a “place-based” approach to learning that has proven effective in Heart Mountain’s series of workshops for educators to learn about the Japanese American incarceration at the site where it happened.

The program is made possible by a grant by an anonymous donor. We are extremely grateful for the support for this vital program.

The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, a Smithsonian Affiliate, preserves the site where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated in Wyoming from 1942 through 1945. Their stories are told within the foundation’s museum, Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Cody and Powell. For more information, call the center at (307) 754-8000 or email info@heartmountain.org.