Page 171 - The First Fifty Years
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ENDURINGLY GREAT 165
hazard to any organization, including the school’s law review,
located on its lower two, mostly underground, floors: when it rained
outdoors, it often poured inside.41
Decades 3 and 4 had been transformational. The College of
Law, now the Law Center,42 increasingly devoted itself to
creating or strengthening institutes, centers, and programs—a
development which accurately reflected growing specialization in
the practice of law.43 Likewise, the content of Houston Law
Review evolved notably. During the publication’s second decade,
HLR had begun to focus on themed issues built around topical
specialties.44 In Decade 3, content increasingly became centered
on the scholarly output of such Law Center programs as the
reinvigorated Health Law & Policy Institute.45 That process took
a great leap forward in Decade 4. Not only the Health Law
program, but also the new Institute for Intellectual Property &
Information Law, contributed annual symposia issues to the
Review,46 while the Frankel Lectures became a Law Center
institution and the premier publishing event of the HOUS. L. REV.
season.47 Within HLR, membership numbers remained stable,48
new procedures and better technologies revolutionized the
publication process,49 and finances took a dramatic turn for the
better.50
Oh. And that “water intrusion” in Decade 4, a.k.a. Tropical
Storm Allison? If Houston Law Review could survive 35 inches of
rain and dislocation from the Law Center for 13 months, surely it
could survive any cloud on the Decade 5 horizon.51
Logistics
Just as the content published in Houston Law Review
throughout Decade 5 demonstrated the rarefied status the
journal had achieved, so too were HLR’s internal operations
now comfortably fine-tuned to afford the student editors every
opportunity to maximize their educational, career, and social
experiences while on the Review.
Chiefly, timeliness of publication and financial security,
historically two issues that had nagged the Review throughout
its existence, had been turned squarely from disadvantages to
decided organizational strengths.52 Publishing the Review on
time, every time, had been made a realistic proposition in large
part by the work of Bob’s Brigade (a.k.a. Board 32)53 and
subsequent boards of Decade 4. In Decade 5, no EIC would
report a drop-off in timeliness of publication, in spite of the
numerous and somewhat routine challenges each board
inevitably faced.54