Page 98 - The First Fifty Years

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92 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

Mark Rothstein’s introductory “commend[ation] [to the
editors] for a fine inaugural Health Law Issue”79 ushered in
numerous academics and health-law practitioners—all at the top
of their fields—who would go on to publish in the dozen Health
Law Symposia issues printed by HLR over the next 12 years. The
list of Health Law authors during Decade 3 is too long to recite in
full, but a sample of the authors’ backgrounds reveals the caliber
of professionals whom the institute attracted.

Among law professors, Harvard, Yale, North Carolina,
Vanderbilt, Washington University, Ohio State, Maryland,
Chicago-Kent, and Indiana all were represented. In Volume 25’s
introductory symposium, Jay Katz of Yale authored Reflections
on Teaching Law & Medicine and Timothy Stolzfus Jost of Ohio
State contributed The Necessary and Proper Role of Regulation to
Assure the Quality of Health Care.80 In Issue 1 of Volume 26,
Kenneth R. Wing of North Carolina introduced the symposium by
discussing the central problem of “trying to contain costs and
maintain the quality and accessibility of health care,”81 and
Karen H. Rothenberg of Maryland wrote Who Cares?: The
Evolution of the Legal Duty to Provide Emergency Care.82 Later in
Volume 26, Merton C. Bernstein of Washington University and
Howard Eglit of Chicago-Kent respectively (and presciently,
given today’s own national discourse on health care) published
Viability of Social Security and Medicare in an Aging Society and
Health Care Allocation for the Elderly: Age Discrimination by
Another Name.83 Rounding out the decade, the early 1990s
brought Eleanor D. Kinney of Indiana publishing Legal and
Ethical Issues in Mental Health Care Delivery: Does Corporate
Form Make a Difference? and Ellen Wright Clayton of Vanderbilt
contributing Screening and Treatment of Newborns.84

Beyond the professors, the stellar resumes of the
policymakers and practitioners who published as part of the
annual Health Law Symposia reveal a staggering “who’s who” of
some of the top health care decisionmakers in the United States:
Joseph A. Califano, Jr. (President Carter’s Secretary of Health,
Education and Welfare and LBJ’s Special Assistant for Domestic
Affairs), Jane Perkins (Director of the Los Angeles-based
National Health Law Program), Mayor Henry Cisneros (of San
Antonio), Larry Gostin (Executive Director of the American
Society of Law and Medicine and professor of law and public
health at Harvard), and Dan W. Brock (professor of philosophy
and biomedical ethics at Brown), among others.85

The content of the symposia was diverse and nationally
relevant. Cost allocation, resource distribution, mental health,