The Women of CourtWatch: Reforming a Corrupt Family Court System (review)

In 1994 five veteran family court judges in Harris County, Texas, drew aggressive opposition from a recently created PAC (political action committee) named CourtWatch. CourtWatch was created by attorneys and litigants (all but one of whom were women) who had grown dissatisfied with the local family courts, special jurisdiction district courts whose judges run for office every four years in partisan elections. After CourtWatch announced its opposition, four of the target judges—all Democrats—opted not to run for reelection. The fifth judge won the primary but was swept out of office in November 1994, along with every other Democrat holding countywide office.

The Women of CourtWatch examines the systemic problems that led to the creation of the group, using as background the life story of one founder, attorney Florence Kusnetz. The book also addresses several broader themes tangentially related to CourtWatch's efforts to reform the Harris County judiciary: the initial travails of women entering the legal profession in the 1970s, the growing role of female attorneys in subsequent decades, the shortcomings of the adversarial system of family law adjudication, and the perceived personal and official flaws of certain Houston judges. The author writes enthusiastically of the emergence of family law mediation as an alternative to litigation, giving primary credit to Kusnetz for introducing and fostering mediation practice in Houston. To bolster the thesis that the Harris County Family Court system was broken, the book also recounts examples of bitterly contested hearings that allegedly left children in the custody of abusive fathers, including one case that became the subject of a controversial HBO documentary. While the unifying theme seems to be CourtWatch's role in the 1994 elections, these disparate threads woven together in a comparatively short book sometimes threaten to unravel.

The author views CourtWatch's 1994 campaign as a success, but she fails to make a convincing case that the retirement or defeat of the challenged judges was really attributable to the group's involvement. Although two hundred CourtWatch members campaigned aggressively for their slate, in the general election candidates endorsed by CourtWatch (which was bipartisan) generally fared no better than other Democratic or Republican candidates they did not endorse. Taking into account the Republican's sweep of countywide offices, it seems more plausible that the Democratic incumbents challenged by CourtWatch fell victim to changing partisan demographics—or would have if they had run for reelection.

After 1994, CourtWatch had some continuing involvement in judicial politics, but eventually it became inactive. As a postscript, the book notes that family law mediation is now a widely accepted alternative to litigation in all urban Texas counties. While some judicial elections in Harris County are contested, all sitting judges elected at the countywide level are Republicans.

The Women of CourtWatch includes six appendixes, including the author's thoughts on "gender socialization" and domestic violence, CourtWatch's 1994 candidate questionnaire, and several mediation case histories supplied by Kusnetz. The book and appendixes may be of interest to individuals studying alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in Texas or the expanding role of women in the law. The book's recounting of the 1994 election, though, provides no convincing analysis of electoral cause and effect, which renders it less useful as political history.