Page 15 - The First Fifty Years

Do Not Delete 1/8/2015 10:14 AM

DRIVEN 9

occurred on January 11, 1963. The publication of HLR’s first
volume32 followed sometime thereafter the same year. The law
school around the Review, like the nation itself, was in upheaval.
Funding, as always at the University of Houston, was scarce, and
bodies were few (14 members in all). In short, the editors of the
upstart journal had little to sustain them except their confidence in
their own abilities and the hope that the new venture would
survive. The few, the brave . . .

In Volume 1, Issue 1, after the first of many pages of
advertising necessary for “lift off!” (in the parlance of the day in
Houston, site of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, itself newly opened
for business in 1963),33 HLR’s first Editor in Chief would write:

The editors recognize that they yet have much to learn about
publishing a law review, and that only the passage of time
accompanied by much hard work will establish the fine
traditions that will make the Review enduringly great.34

“Enduringly great”? In the circumstances into which
Houston Law Review had been born?

Absurd.
Or maybe not. After all, Houston Law Review’s first faculty
advisor turned out to be none other than A.A. White. White had,
in fact, suggested the creation of the law review even before the
students did,35 although it was they who got the job done. Their
dexterity as editors, and that of their advisor, would quickly be
tested.

CONDOMS AND COCKROACHES

Condoms and cockroaches did not grace the pages of any
volume of Houston Law Review during Decade 1 of its existence.
But they nearly did. Volume 1, although necessarily cobbled
together in short order by Board 1,36 came and went without
incident and with many excellences, as will appear below. Board
2’s editors,37 however, shortly found themselves confronted with
the tantalizingly titled Trouble in a Bottle: From Condoms to
Cockroaches—a voluminous examination of contaminated bottle
litigation from across the country. Wisely, they declined to print
it,38 realizing that, as a start-up organization with big goals but
limited resources, Houston Law Review should seek out and
publish only serious-minded pieces that would advance its cause.

Still, the pages of Volume 2 reveal the dichotomy. Condoms
and cockroaches were nowhere to be found; in their place were
articles on fair use in copyright law, nontaxable corporate
separations, and the constitutionality of wiretapping—all topics of