Page 164 - The First Fifty Years

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158 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

CONTENT FIRST

“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.”2 So wrote Houston
Law Review’s first Editor in Chief, Dan G. Matthews, in Volume
1, Issue 1, in 1963. By 2012, HLR had arrived, ranking in the top
2.5% of all law reviews worldwide—with a year to spare as the
organization approached its 50th anniversary.3

Today, the sometimes winding byway of Houston Law
Review’s early years has become a full-speed-ahead
superhighway of scholarly accomplishment as the publication’s
first half-century reaches its end. The inevitable potholes of the
vanguard years under HLR’s Founding Generation4 have long
since been paved over thoroughly by the successes of those who
came after them.

The chief concerns of Decade 1 had been, first, establishing
the organization, but then, keeping it afloat by, among other
things, simply finding enough articles to occupy the pages of the
start-up issues.5 In filling the initial void, the law school’s faculty
provided a huge assist. John Mixon, Dwight Olds, John Neibel,
and others combined with numerous local practitioners to
educate HLR’s readers on a variety of issues of interest to the
local bar.6 Soon, the concern about content was allayed almost
entirely by the Review’s good fortune in publishing contributions
by such eminent figures as Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark
(twice) and U.S. Solicitor General Archibald Cox, together with
professors from the best law schools in the country—Harvard,
Stanford, Penn, George Washington, and more.7 An increase in
issues per volume from three to five accompanied the
organization’s growing reach.8

Decade 2 brought increased financial pressures that
corresponded with the organization’s rapid expansion in size and
scope (caused largely by the construction of Teaching Unit II, an
additional classroom building),9 but Newell Blakely’s Texas Rules
of Evidence Handbook soon offered at least a semi-permanent
solution.10 And while the Review’s early successes included
contributions by professors from Columbia, NYU, Duke,
Michigan, and the like, Texas-focused scholarship continued to
predominate.11 The emergence of themed issues set the stage for
the most important and long-lasting developments over the next
30 years.12

By Decade 3’s “Centered” years,13 financial concerns had
returned in the wake of the Review’s publication of numerous