“It’s fun as lawyers and judges to see how these cases were tried, for example, in the 1940s compared to how they’re tried today,” Judge Chin said in an interview at his chambers, once occupied by Justice Thurgood Marshall. “A good cross-examination back then is not that different from a good cross-examination today.”

To produce a reenactment, the group pulls together excerpts from trial transcripts, testimony, and briefs, along with other original documents. (The Tokyo Rose case involved 6,000 pages.) Chin and his wife write the narration that weaves the excerpts together. Historic photographs, projected via PowerPoint, set the scene.

The reenactments offer a creative way for lawyers to earn Continuing Legal Education credits. But they also raise troubling issues. One reenactment involved the murder of Vincent Chin, an American of Chinese descent (no relation to the judge) who was fatally beaten in 1982 with a baseball bat on the night of his bachelor party. Witnesses recalled that Chin’s murderers had shouted obscenities, blaming Asian Americans like Chin for the layoffs that were ripping through Detroit’s auto industry.

Despite pleading guilty and no contest, respectively, to manslaughter, Ronald Ebens and his step-son, Michael Nitz, were sentenced to three years’ probation, a $3,000 fine, and court costs of $260. The sentences galvanized the Asian American community and led to two federal criminal civil rights trials. Nitz was acquitted; Ebens was sentenced to 25 years in prison but was later acquitted in a retrial.

“That kind of resentment and the big questions about the verdict are similar to Trayvon Martin,” said attorney Trinh Tran, who organized a reenactment of the Tokyo Rose trial while she was a law student at Hofstra. (AABANY’s reenactments have also been presented at Fordham, NYU, Princeton, and University of California Hastings.)

The group's 2011 reenactment, Ozawa and Thind, stemmed from two 1920s Supreme Court cases presided over by Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft. The story involved a Japanese man in Hawaii and an Indian man in Washington, each of whom tried to become naturalized U.S. citizens at a time when the law hadn’t yet defined where Asians fit in. In the reenactment at the national conference in Atlanta in 2011, Ozawa’s granddaughter Carol Leonard played the role of his daughter, her aunt Edith.

“It was heartbreaking for me to realize that after all the effort my grandfather expended, having written his own legal brief and taken his cause to the U.S. Supreme Court, he died 16 years before Congress finally removed racial restrictions for naturalization,” Leonard said in an email. Ozawa would not live to see Pearl Harbor, the internment of Japanese Americans in its aftermath, or the death of his only son, George, on an Italian battlefield in 1943. (Two weeks before the premiere of Ozawa and Thind, George’s unit — the all-Japanese-American 100th Infantry Battalion — received the Congressional Gold Medal.)