At sixty-six, after thirty-two years as a federal prosecutor, Leslie Cayer Ohta volunteered for a year inside a war zone.
In 2011, the Justice Department put out a call for experienced attorneys willing to deploy to post-war Baghdad. Decades into a federal career, with every reason to stay home, Leslie raised her hand.
Justice in Baghdad is the account of the year that followed: teaching constitutional law to Iraqi police cadets, coaching law students through the world's largest international moot court competition, and documenting the detention of children - some as young as eight - prosecuted for terrorism without a lawyer in the room.
She lived inside the most expensive embassy compound ever built, where Americans dined as if on a cruise ship while the country outside came apart. She sat at coalition tables where everyone understood the leverage was theoretical and the money would flow regardless. She saw what a single security breach cost the Iraqi interpreters who had trusted her country. And in a surgeon forced to hide her own name to stay alive, she glimpsed the price the war exacted from the very people trying to rebuild.
Leslie had spent three decades at the Department of Justice because she believed the rule of law was worth the work - in courtrooms and, as it turned out, in war zones. Justice in Baghdad is her clear-eyed reckoning with service, integrity, and the distance between the democracy America preaches and the one it builds - a memoir for anyone who has ever wondered what it actually takes to do the right thing inside an imperfect institution.
