Leslie Cayer Ohta
Justice in Baghdad:
A Memoir of Law, Service, and Integrity
About
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.
Leslie Cayer Ohta spent more than three decades as a federal attorney—representing the United States in multi-billion-dollar contract litigation, building asset-forfeiture cases against drug cartels, and, more than once, standing on principle even when her own institution made it costly. In 2011, at sixty-six and thirty-two years into that career, she answered an Attorney General’s call for experienced lawyers willing to deploy to Baghdad. She spent the following year as a Resident Legal Advisor on a Provincial Reconstruction Team—teaching constitutional law at Iraq’s national police college, coaching law students through the world’s largest moot court competition, and documenting child-detention conditions for the State Department’s human rights report. She came home having seen, up close, the gap between what democracies promise and what they deliver—and walked away from her career rather than compromise what she believed it stood for.
Since leaving the Justice Department, Leslie has taught constitutional law and served as an appointed public defender with Connecticut’s Office of the Chief Public Defender, representing indigent clients and families in child-protection cases. Her federal service was preceded by two years in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, years living and working in Japan, and a tour as an election monitor in Bosnia. She holds a J.D. with honors from the University of Connecticut School of Law, where she finished in the top of her class and tied for the highest score on the state bar examination, and a B.A. in chemistry from Emmanuel College. The recipient of numerous Department of Justice awards, she lives in Connecticut.