Page 123 - The First Fifty Years

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THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD 117

students attracted to the Law Center by health law studies,
HLPI decided to strike out on its own with a new, specialized
journal. Thus ended Houston Law Review’s annual Health Law
Symposia series.

Fortunately, as Health Law departed HLR’s pages,7 a new
kid on the institute block stepped in to fill the annual symposium
gap.

Intellectual Property and Information Law.8 From its
earliest decades, Houston Law Review had displayed a peculiar
and sustained interest in IP and information law. True, the
subjects did not receive coverage with nearly the same regularity
as, say, litigation matters; and both energy law, and then health
law as HLPI grew, also appeared with greater frequency. All of
HLR’s first five volumes, however, contained articles addressing
intellectual property and/or entertainment law.9 In Decade 2,
Raymond T. Nimmer, an already-distinguished scholar who
would serve as Law Center dean in both Decades 4 and 5, began
to write about electronic funds transfer systems,10 thereby
presaging his later interest in computer and information law;
and another author noted matter-of-factly: “The computer
software industry is exploding.”11 Decade 3 continued the focus,
with not only attention to traditional applications of familiar IP
law12 but also a venture into the brave new interface between IP
and health law.13 And also in Decade 3 (indeed, the year before
Mark Rothstein revivified the moribund Health Law program),
Nimmer founded his own Computer Law Institute to promote the
study and dissemination of knowledge in his new specialty.14

In 1991, the Law Center’s Dean, Robert L. Knauss, asked
the school’s copyright professor, Craig Joyce, to consider founding
an Intellectual Property program to complement Nimmer’s
Computer Law Institute. The copyright law professor, while
recognizing that he was the only member of the school’s full-time
faculty specializing in any of the traditional IP subjects
(principally, copyright, trademark, and patent law), felt
compelled to point out a problem. Houston, Texas, might be a
powerhouse center for the petrochemical, biomedical, and
astrophysical industries, all of them highly interconnected with
patent (and trade secret) law, but it was far from the center of
the copyright industries on the East and West Coasts.

Thus, for an IP program to be located in Houston, the
copyright law professor thought that he might make an excellent
mascot, just not an adequate director. The Dean accepted the
change in plans. With the faculty’s approval, the copyright
professor became faculty director of the Law Center’s newest