Page 125 - The First Fifty Years
P. 125
Do Not Delete 1/5/2015 4:05 PM
THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD 119
coupled with the history of the Spring Lecture (see
immediately below) and told in Decade 5.
The Spring Lectures.21 Also during Decade 4, although its
first fruits would not be published until the beginning of
HLR’s following decade, Joyce and the Review
established a new lecture series, intended to be held each
spring and with the specific purpose of furnishing for
HLR’s publication articles by leading figures, nationally
and internationally, in the fields of intellectual property
and information law. The series, also known as “The
Baker Botts Lectures” in honor of its long-time sponsor,
commenced publication with an article by Columbia Law
School professor and eminent copyright scholar Jane C.
Ginsburg in Volume 41. For further details, see the
Decade 5 essay.
All of the foregoing initiatives were commenced in Decade 4.
But in the course of the decade, a new entity emerged as HLR’s
partner. In 1999, under the enlightened leadership of Dean
Stephen Zamora, the IP program and the Computer Law
Institute, which had been co-branding programs for the better
part of the decade, joined together as the Institute for
Intellectual Property & Information Law (IPIL).22 By the end of
Decade 4, then, Houston Law Review and IPIL had forged a firm,
new partnership, the fruits of which by then had begun
appearing prominently in the pages of the Review.23
Founding Frankel24
Of all of the challenges which down through the years have
faced the board of editors of Houston Law Review, none have
been more pressing than the needs both to improve continually
the content of the publication and also, somehow, to keep the
enterprise afloat financially. The latter concern has been a
frequent topic of these essays.25 Happily, the single most
important event of Decade 4—the founding of the Frankel
Lectures—combined both to help relieve HLR’s constant funding
worries and to advance dramatically its unbending
determination to publish ever more outstanding scholarship.
The story of the Frankel Lectures, according to Robert J.
Sergesketter, Editor in Chief of Board 32 (the “soldier” referenced
above and described in greater detail below), began in 1994 when
a “young professor,”26 Craig Joyce, strode into the Review’s
adequate but not palatial offices for a seemingly impromptu chat.