Vol. 8 No. 6 (June 1998) pp. 279-280.

KINSHIP AND POLITICS: THE JUSTICES OF THE UNITED STATES AND LOUISIANA SUPREME COURTS by Donn M. Kurtz II. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. 249 pp. Cloth $40. ISBN 0-8071-2064-2.

Reviewed by Elliot E. Slotnick, Department of Political Science and the Graduate School, The Ohio State University <slotnick.1@osu.edu>
 

KINSHIP AND POLITICS is a comprehensive study of the elite socialization and recruitment of justices to the U.S. and Louisiana Supreme Courts through the eyes of a scholar who, from all appearances, has a passionate interest in the judicial branch and, even more so, in the subject of political families. Through painstaking analysis utilizing an eclectic range of primary and secondary sources, Kurtz documents that the 202 Louisiana and U.S. Supreme Court justices included in the study hail disproportionately from kinship lines where past, present, or future kinsmen held, hold, or will hold public office. In addition to extending his study forwards and backwards in time, Kurtz demonstrates that political families generally extend across state lines as well.

Kurtz' analysis relies heavily on his own earlier work in this domain as well as on the synthesis of the limited work accomplished by others. He broadens our scholarly gaze regarding political kinship relationships by going well beyond the narrow (and generally used) focal point of simply looking at the occupations of the fathers of those who become judges. Beyond the general observation that the majority of Louisiana and U.S. Supreme Court justices are members of political families, Kurtz reveals that about half of the justices under study were the sons of public officials. Twenty percent of the Louisiana and 28% of the U.S. Supreme Court justices married the daughters of public officials, while one in four Louisiana and one out of two U.S. Supreme Court justices are revealed to have office holding relatives in other states. Kurtz also calls attention to the fact that those from political families display an earlier interest in politics, begin their political careers earlier, reach high office at a younger age, and remain in their positions longer than those who do not have such a family background.

All of this is well and good and, if one finds these observations in and of themselves to be of great interest, this is clearly the book for you. Indeed, readers with such interests will also be rewarded with copious appendices that account for more than half of the book's pages. These appendices document the author's sources for information on each justice and portray in inclusive detail a listing of the justices studied and their families, as well as all of the family networks in which the universe of justices under analysis could be located.

Despite these virtues, for the reasons set out below, I found the book extremely hard going. For one thing, a good deal of the analysis focuses on comparisons between the Louisiana and federal data sets without any effort to establish why such comparisons are of any more theoretical interest than similar comparisons drawn between any pair of random states or between any state and the U.S. Supreme Court justices. The reader is left to draw the only possible conclusion that Louisiana is being studied because that is where the author lives and, perhaps, most readers would have an inherently greater interest in U.S. Supreme Court justices then in any other judicial population. These are both valid points, but do not themselves generate theoretical interest in the analysis. The closest the analysis comes to a concept that could harbor theoretical interest is in its categorization of justices as Founders, Transmitters, Maintainers or Contemporaries, labels that underscore the jurist's place in any political family lines.

Beyond the general lack of theoretical or explanatory focus, the reader will be struck by the barrage of percentages (sampled above) that overwhelm more than inform. In the absence of the chapter ending summaries (that, thankfully, are provided), we wouldn't know which relationships the author considered important; even with the summaries, we rarely know why a relationship is considered to be an important one. In particular, Chapters 4 and 5 entitled, respectively, "The Smaller Kinship Networks," and "A National Elite Network, 1632-1988," are not for the faint hearted. These chapters present a stringed litany of the members of each kinship network revealed in the analysis. Again, I would urge all but the most interested readers to skip pages 47 through 78 and read, instead, the two-page summary on pages 79-80 for the gist of what these chapters hold.

The bottom line for me is that Kurtz fails to explore the interesting analytical questions that these observations of political families implicate, most specifically, the question of what this all adds up to--particularly with regard to its importance for understanding political behavior. Here, Kurtz simply defers. "[T]he purpose of this...research is in many ways exploratory.... Investigating the policy implications of kinship has not been and is not now an objective." (p.97) While such a choice is, of course, the author's prerogative, I fear that for many readers, including this one, the consequences of that choice diminish seriously the interest in and importance of the research reported in this volume.


Copyright 1998