Page 17 - The First Fifty Years

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

DRIVEN 11

John Neibel, soon to be dean, opined on the Implications of
Robinson v. California, echoing Justice Potter Stewart (who
himself was echoing the appellee’s brief) with these, the first
words published in the inaugural issue of the Review: “It is
generally conceded that a narcotic addict, particularly one
addicted to the use of heroin, is in a state of mental and physical
illness.”40 How appropriate that the first sentence of the Review’s
first article should feature the College of Law’s dean quoting a
Supreme Court case about an issue of national concern. After all,
six of Volume 1 and 2’s professional articles would be written by
the school’s faculty; only one was by a law professor from another
school.

Practitioners generally led the way in the earliest volumes.
Nonetheless, while the Review did focus heavily on scholarship of
interest chiefly to Texas lawyers (topics ranging from Texas
criminal courts of inquiry to apartment ownership in Texas), the
nationwide scope of content necessary to achieve steadily increasing
quality was not altogether an afterthought. Commentaries on
multiple Supreme Court cases (Robinson v. California41 and Reed v.
Steamship Yaka42), privity in the sale of goods, patent litigation,
copyright fair use, migrant-labor laws, the legality of wiretapping,
and nontaxable corporate separations satisfied those readers from
the academy concerned with more than Texas-centered scholarship.

The bell cow of the early years was Justice Tom C. Clark.43
Surrounded in the pages of the Review by members of the local bar
and professors from the local law school, Justice Clark stands out as
a herald of the publication’s promising future. His slightly offhand-
sounding title: Random Thoughts on the Court’s Interpretation of
Individual Rights. A United States Supreme Court Justice opining
on American liberty, quoting Justice Holmes, and providing
metaphysical and historical justifications for the Court’s role in
protecting human dignity, all in the Review’s very first volume!

The Academy Pulls Ahead
What Clark had begun in Volume 1, Solicitor General
Archibald Cox carried forward in Volume 3. Long before the Review
hosted its first Frankel Lecture or printed its first symposium issue
(events which would become the hallmarks of its mature years),
Cox’s 1965 address to the Student Bar Association’s Annual Spring
Banquet was reprinted as an article in Volume 3, Issue 1. The
Constitutionality of the Proposed Voting Rights Act of 1965 afforded
the Review its second article by a figure prominent on the national
scene. And like Clark’s article before it, Cox’s address ensured that