Page 139 - The First Fifty Years

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THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD 133

of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner and
William Patry, University of Houston Law Center Class of 1980
and author of Patry on Copyright, another standout treatise in
the field that he and David Nimmer share.

Initially a pinch hitter for the departing Health Law
Institute, almost immediately IPIL was batting clean-up.

The Allison Board(s)

As the new millennium began and Decade 4 neared its end,
success was building on success at Houston Law Review. Both
substantively and organizationally, the decade had been one of
unprecedented progress. How would the last two boards—Board
39 (2001–2002) and Board 40 (2002–2003)—finish? Spectacularly
well.

In the fall of 2001, Board 39 would publish 411 pages of
IPIL’s inaugural symposium issue, a signal accomplishment if for
no other reasons than that symposia issues always mean more
authors, hence more pages, and that subject matter of an IPIL
symposium is never run-of-the-mill for persons not ordinarily
skilled in the IP arts,86 like the typical HLR editor. Together,
Boards 39 and 40 would publish a total of 1735 pages, including
such classics of Houston Law Review literature as the Frankel
Lectures of Robert W. Hamilton and David B. Wilkins,87 Judge
Posner’s trenchant essay in IPIL’s Considering Copyright
symposium,88 and the extensive collection of heartfelt tributes
occasioned by the retirement from the faculty of G. Sidney
Buchanan, HLR’s own “Captain Nice.”89

All of this is well, but of course it was made much more
remarkable by the circumstances in which the last two boards of
Decade 4 performed. And so, again, Allison.

Tropical Storm Allison, when it came and went on June 9–
10, 2001, left in its wake the single most expensive disaster ever
to hit an American law school.90 Federal Emergency Relief
Assistance (FEMA) estimated the damage to the collections of the
O’Quinn Law Library, alone, at $42 million—a record claim that
would topple along with the Twin Towers three months later.

How to recover, if recovery was even possible? The task fell
to Boards 39 and 40 and the facilities team at the Law Center,
with massive assists from FEMA, the University of Houston, and
the local legal community.91

As in each prior decade of these essays,92 the saga of Houston
Law Review’s struggle to survive, and then surmount, the
devastation caused by Allison linked inextricably to the story of
the University of Houston Law Center, the larger institution that