Page 18 - The First Fifty Years

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12 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

Houston Law Review would enter into the national dialogue
concerning the ongoing struggle for greater civil rights for all
Americans.

Serious law journals address the serious legal issues of the day.
The civil rights movement was the paramount social issue of the
day as the Review pressed forward in its first decade. Articles by
Justice Clark and Solicitor General Cox ensured that the journal’s
two most visible pieces in its earliest volumes would provide
important commentary on the changing landscape of individual
rights in the United States. And they were not alone.

Throughout the decade, the Review published numerous
articles containing commentary on the civil rights movement.
Joining Clark and Cox were, among others, Professor Alfred Avins
of Memphis State University with Social Equality and the
Fourteenth Amendment: The Original Understanding, Professor
Nathaniel E. Gozansky of Emory University School of Law with
School Desegregation in the Fifth Circuit, and practitioner Robert
W. Doty with The Texas Voter Registration Law and the Due
Process Clause.

As the decade progressed, the Review’s contents became
increasingly more diverse and accomplished, as did the CVs of the
published authors. Houston Law Review would never abandon its
commitment to educating the Texas Bar (indeed, even today its
online-only HLRe: Off the Record demonstrates a continued
commitment to publishing articles of practical importance to Texas
lawyers), but achieving the Review’s larger goals required an
increased reliance on national law professors. Volumes 4 through 10
brought just that.

Harvard, Stanford, Pennsylvania, George Washington, Emory,
Alabama, U.C. Davis, and American University—law professors
from these diverse schools (and many others) helped to enhance the
Review’s budding credibility. Justice Clark returned in Volume 6;
justices of the Supreme Courts of Texas and Colorado published
articles in Volumes 4 and 10; Texas trial court judges appeared
periodically; and United States Senator Mike Mansfield published
in Volume 9. A geographically and professionally diverse group,
these authors provided articles concerning issues of critical national
prominence, including nuclear power regulation, the role and power
of the Supreme Court, societal resistance to the law, and obscenity
and the law.44

While local law professors and practitioners continued to make
regular and vital contributions, by the end of the Review’s first
decade its ambition to become a journal of steadily broader scope
and recognition was evident. In spite of a marked reliance on