Page 142 - The First Fifty Years

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136 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

lake as “SOS.” In truth, although the point may not have been
page-one news in the long history of post-Allison recovery, the
all-student suite proved to be a huge boon to the organizations.
Total space accorded to student organizations within the Law
Center was tripled at a single stroke. Three dozen organizations
whose space formerly had consisted of one locker each in the
Student Bar Association’s quarters acquired offices of their own.
The largest organizations, HOUS. L. REV. included, not only
retained their prior square footages but expanded on them.97

One hard problem remained: the actual allocation of space
within SOS to particular organizations. As the senior student
publication at the Law Center and the principal external
projection of the school’s scholarly excellence, HLR deserved to
recover, in the new organizations suite, what had been, prior to
Allison, the facility’s largest and best-located student space.

To get it done, however, the Review’s faculty advisor, who
was also the Law Center’s facilities chair,98 would have to make
the assignment—an apparent conflict of interest that could do
harm both to the Law Center and to HLR. Like Captain Nice
before him,99 the faculty advisor chose to solve the problem before
it became a problem: by resigning. With no conflict to impede the
decision necessary to be made, the facilities chair then quietly
assigned Houston Law Review its rightful space in the Student
Organizations Suite.

Done. In July of 2002, after a year and a month of wandering
in the post-Allison wilderness, HLR moved into its new digs.
Board 39 never got to see the promised land; and Board 40 would
have to reinvent processes none of its members or editors had
ever seen performed anywhere but in copy shops and sagging
trailers. But the two volumes produced by the post-storm boards
remain forever as mute tributes to the extraordinary efforts
required to save Houston Law Review in its hour of maximum
peril.

Allison had been monumentally difficult for all concerned.
But in time the experience proved to have been a valuable lesson.
In 2005, in an event as unprecedented as the aftermath of its
own tropical storm, UHLC would volunteer to help another
stricken law school and serve as “home away from home” for
Loyola University’s College of Law—hosting its classes and
administrative functions for an entire semester—after Hurricane
Katrina struck in New Orleans. But that is another story.100

By the summer of 2002, then, the University of Houston Law
Center had been fully reconstituted, including the installation of
all student journals and other group activities in the Student