Page 122 - The First Fifty Years

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LEAPING (AS IN “FORWARD”) . . .

Centering Continued

For the first time in these essays, in Houston Law Review’s
Decade 4 there were no new buildings at the University of
Houston Law Center. Deans came, but mostly went (serving an
average of 2.5 years each during the decade), and no new
reconceptualizations of the mission of the school as a whole
emerged that would themselves change the course of Review
history.2

But in the Law Center organizations that impacted deeply
the content of HLR’s volumes, and within Houston Law Review
itself, big things were happening. A soldier stormed the
entrenched battlements of HLR and took command of the Review
at a decisive moment; content reached a level of quality never
before seen, although fondly imagined; and then there was
Allison.

Notwithstanding all the tumult, Decade 4 would become the
loadstar of HLR’s great leap forward.

Health Law. By far the most important (to HLR, at least) of
the many institutes, centers, and programs that had sprung up
during Decade 3’s transformation of the University of Houston’s
College of Law into the Law Center we know today3 had been the
Health Law & Policy Institute (HLPI), renamed and
reinvigorated by its new director, Professor Mark Rothstein of
the Law Center faculty, in 1986. A significant portion of
Centered, the predecessor to the present essay, is devoted to the
detailed history of HLPI as it relates to Houston Law Review.4

Suffice it to say by way of recap here that HLPI’s consistent
ranking at the top of health law programs among U.S. law
schools not only burnished the ratings of HLR’s parent
organization, the Law Center, but also, through the presentation
of 12 nationally visible, top-quality symposia, enabled the Review
to publish in its pages the work of world-class scholars whose
affiliation with HLR would have been the envy of any law review
in America.

By 2000, however, the partnership between HLPI and HLR
had run its course. Mark Rothstein and his wife, Laura
Rothstein, were departing for the University of Louisville, where
Laura would become Dean of the Louis D. Brandeis School of
Law.5 For a variety of reasons,6 including the desires of the