Page 97 - The First Fifty Years
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Beyond Just “Themed Issues”
The beginnings of Houston Law Review’s gathering reliance
on “themed issues” is described at length in Carry on Boldly, the
immediately prior episode in this series of essays.74 What
happened next in Decade 3, however, might aptly be described as
growth “on steroids.”
President Gerald Ford ushered in Decade 3’s first of many
“special” articles with his remarks, The White House and
Congress: Congressional Restraints on Presidential Authority,
which served as the inaugural address for the Butler & Binion
Lecture Series.75 A former Chief Executive publishing in Houston
Law Review was cause enough for widespread celebration. But
Ford’s presence foreshadowed something larger: what followed
was a decade that saw the Review’s first-ever lecture series
(Butler & Binion), the reinvigoration of the Law Center’s Health
Law Institute (which would lead to numerous symposium issues
published in HLR), a budding relationship between HLR and the
Law Center’s newly formed IP Institute, and the continued
prominence of issues concerning energy and environmental law.
Justice Antonin Scalia notably contributed to Volume 24’s
Conference on Rethinking Tort and Environmental Liability
Laws: Needs and Objectives of the Late 20th Century and
Beyond.76 Joining Scalia were some of the nation’s leading
experts in the field, including keynote speaker and former EPA
Administrator William D. Ruckelshaus, former U.S. Deputy
Attorney General Carol Dinkins, and Professors George L. Priest
of Yale, Robert L. Rabin of Stanford, Alan Schwartz of Southern
California, and John W. Wade of Vanderbilt, among others. Just
four years after publishing a U.S. President, the Review
published a Supreme Court Justice, high-ranking federal
government officials, and professors from Stanford, Yale,
Vanderbilt, and Southern California. Other symposia would
produce similarly gratifying results.
Subsequent iterations of the Butler & Binion Lecture
Series produced articles by Griffin B. Bell,77 former Attorney
General of the United States and Fifth Circuit judge, and
Lawrence Walsh, former Independent Counsel for the Iran–
Contra Investigation, Personal Representative to President
Nixon at the Paris Meetings on Vietnam, and Deputy Attorney
General of the United States.78 But above all, perhaps the
biggest development of the decade was the publication in HLR
of issues tied to the newly revived Health Law & Policy
Institute.