Donny Kimoe practices in a legal system I invented for this book. If you try to look up any of the statutes or cases cited here, you won’t find them (with a few exceptions, notably Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823)). But they are all extrapolations from existing legal precedents, from the military tribunals of Guantánamo and the Civil War to the loyalty laws of the Red Scare and the Cold War and the martial law invocations that occurred with remarkable frequency in the twentieth century, especially before World War II. To develop my jurisprudential variation on speculative fictional world- building, I spent a tremendous amount of time in the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas School of Law, taking advantage of its prodigious collection of material, which even includes a section of dusty how-to guides for the domestic administration of military government in times of insurrection or emergency—as well as an amazing collection of law and popular culture ready-made for a writer wishing to decode the deep roots of the American lawyer story. I owe thanks to the librar- ians of that amazing institution, and to the authors of the many remarkable works I drew from in my research.

The other experience I had while working on Tropic of Kansas that had a big influence on this book was my service for several months on a Texas grand jury. Having only ever worked at the margins of criminal procedure over the course of my career as a lawyer, I found it a unique opportunity, and an eye-opener. Unlike a trial jury, which sits as the finder of fact in a specific case, the grand jury hears the government’s presentation of each felony indictment it wants to prosecute. The standard it applies is low. And the volume of cases it hears is huge—dozens or more a day, two or three days a week. Our panel was a diverse group of Texans with good bullshit detectors and a strong sense of justice, and we did our job to turn away cases where the standard was not met. But in most of the cases, indictments were issued based on the evidence, and you learned what it feels like to be part of the machine that takes people (many of them young people) off the street, marks them for life, and locks them up. People who may be guilty of the crimes for which they’ve been arrested, but caught through a process that’s rigged—from the decisions about what activity should be criminalized to the decisions about what neighborhoods to patrol to the way the system allocates access to lawyers. Serving on a grand jury, you quickly gain a deeper understanding of how justice is distributed the same way ev- erything else is in this society. That from at least some vantage points, the system is already pretty dystopian, even without distortion through the prism of imaginative fiction. The experience recharged my sense of pervasive injustice in a way that impacted my own practice, especially my pro bono and community work, and led to me pursue the idea of this book. So thanks to my fellow grand jurors for helping me see the law from the perspective of their very different experiences, and to the court for the opportunity.