Page 16 - The First Fifty Years

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10 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

national concern. Yet an examination of the table of contents
reveals all Volume 2 authors to be practitioners rather than
professional legal scholars, with one noticeable (and soon-to-be
common) exception: College of Law professor Dwight A. Olds. Olds
indeed authored three articles, including an assessment of
mechanics’ liens under Texas law and a practitioner-oriented piece
instructing lawyers on the practical consequences of recording acts.
As the sole representative of legal academia in Volume 2, Olds
joined a group of local practitioners to comment on matters
important to the Houston Bar, while simultaneously addressing the
kinds of scholarly legal topics necessary to begin to bring the Review
attention on the radar screen of respected publications.

As Houston Law Review was setting up shop in its early
years, the focus was clear: to achieve its founders’ aims, the
publication’s contents eventually would have to include
nationally relevant articles by nationally renowned scholars. But
such articles were not readily available to HLR’s editors in its
beginning years so, along with the practitioners, the school’s
faculty—Olds, Mixon, Neibel, Raymond Britton, and others—
pitched in vigorously to provide articles of quality.

Thus, local practitioners and College of Law professors
dominated the pages of the early volumes. The mix, however, was
unstable from volume to volume.

The Academy or the Bar?

The academy or the bar? Who would be the Review’s primary
audience, and what would they read? Fifty years of hindsight
evidence the steady emergence of a tier-one law journal as the
leading edge of a tier-one law school. Today’s Houston Law
Review is a national top-50 publication that consistently prints
only top-flight articles by professional authors of recognized
stature.39 Yet the success ultimately achieved was not always so
certain, and certainly not guaranteed.

As suggested in Humble Beginnings above, during the early
days of the Review the College of Law itself faced an identity
crisis, which in turn was reflected in the content of HLR’s
volumes. As the law school struggled to define itself—would it
compete with the top academic institutions in the region, or
would it settle for a role that favored degree volume over
scholarly research?—the Review faced a similar dilemma.
Volumes 1 and 2 illustrate the contrast.

The first article published in the first issue of Houston Law
Review was penned by a member of the law school’s own faculty.