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Reviewed by:
  • Sunflower Justice: A New History of the Kansas Supreme Court by R. Alton Lee
  • Sean M. Kammer
R. Alton Lee, Sunflower Justice: A New History of the Kansas Supreme Court. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 376pp. $52.00.

This book is an attempt to fill a perceived gap in Kansas historiography by providing a legal history not written by lawyers, for lawyers. Drawing upon his vast experience in writing on Kansas political and social history, Lee seeks simply to provide “a brief overview, conveniently located in one volume, of the judges [of the state’s supreme court] and the decisions they wrote that mold Kansas legal history within the context of Kansas constitutional, political, economic, legal, and social history” (x). Though the author eschews any attempt at writing a “definitive history” of Kansas’s highest court, this is still a tall task. This work may be a prime example of how difficult an endeavor it truly is.

The book is organized chronologically. It begins in the territorial period of “Bleeding Kansas” and ends with the Kansas Supreme Court’s conservative turn in the 1970s. One persistent theme of the work is the struggle of the judges in squaring legal precedent with the demands of an ever-changing society. During this time, the court resolved important, and often difficult, issues involving agrarian reform, organized labor, monopolization, public health, corporate liability for injuries to employees, customers, and the public, prohibition, censorship, racial segregation and desegregation, and women’s reproductive freedoms. Lee is most effective in chronicling the court’s relationship to the populist and progressive reform movements from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth—not at all surprising given his past scholarly work. [End Page 97]

Lee’s chief aim is to contextualize legal developments within the broader socio-political history of Kansas. Indeed, this is, after all, what separates a historian’s use of a past legal document and a lawyer’s. While lawyers examine a particular document for language that might apply to some present circumstance, historians find meaning only by exploring the document’s context, by placing the document within that context, and, in part, by scrutinizing the document for any subtext. Unfortunately, Lee’s organization of each chapter detracts from this. All but the first are divided into three sections: the first section sets the “political scene,” the second provides brief biographies of the key judges of the particular era, and the last examines specific cases and how the court decided them. Though readers may appreciate the orderliness of this approach, it regrettably also serves to detach the judges and legal developments from their historical context—the precise opposite of what Lee seeks to do. At times, Lee’s analysis of cases reads like a police blotter, jumping from one case to another (and one issue to another) without much of an analytical thread tying them together. Moreover, Lee rarely reads “between the lines,” instead tending to take the judges’ written rationales at face value.

To some degree, this book does what Lee promises in the preface: it provides a “brief overview” and a useful reference for students of Kansas history. As a student, I was once taught to ask myself five “W” questions in analyzing any historical phenomenon. With Sunflower Justice, Lee effectively answers four of the five “W” questions regarding the history of Kansas’ highest court: the “who,” the “what,” the “when,” and the “where.” However, he leaves perhaps the most important of the “W” questions for future studies: the “why.” For instance, why did the judges decide cases in the way they did? Why were certain issues raised and not others? Why were legal developments in Kansas different than in other states? Why were they the same? In other words, what, if anything, separates “sunflower justice” from regular, run-of-the-mill justice? And why does it matter? [End Page 98]

Sean M. Kammer
University of South Dakota School of Law
Vermillion, South Dakota
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