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TH: Well, tell us a little bit how you became involved with the Office of Redress and maybe even give us a little example of your experience on the first days and weeks on the job.

EK: Sure. So actually when I graduated from law school, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do. All I knew was I wasn't interested in doing the typical law firm route. So I ended up moving to the Washington, D.C. area where a classmate of mine, Nike Okediji, also was. And she was working in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice and heard about this opportunity, that the Office of Redress Administration was looking for people to help out. And I actually started as a contractor initially for the first couple of months before switching over to joining as a staff attorney with the office. So originally... by the time I joined in 1994, early '95, the office had really gone through a lot of the easier-to-verify claims. These were claims that were submitted by people who might have been on incarceration camp rosters or other official government documentation. And for the duration of my time, we dealt with a lot of the unique cases. And so I often worked with community leaders and individuals one on one, to try to help them verify and establish their claim. And as I became more experienced working with the office, I had a little bit more leeway to exercise what that legal judgment might be. And I worked a lot with Tink Cooper, who was the other attorney in the office at that time, in coming up with legal theories and arguments for whether someone should be eligible or not. And we also worked with Joanne Chiedi, and at that time the administrator was DeDe Greene, where there were close calls or unusual cases to decide the outcome.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2020 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.