Page 19 - The First Fifty Years

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DRIVEN 13

practitioner-oriented articles early on, the Review had begun to
emerge as a serious engine of scholarly research.45 To get better,
however, as the editors of the publication quickly recognized,
Houston Law Review would have to grow.

Ramping Up Production

As the ambition and visibility of the Review increased, so
necessarily did its size (both in paper and in people). To
accommodate longer articles, more distinguished authors, and more
diverse subject matter, the heft of each volume began to increase.

Volume 1 introduced the journal to the world as a three-issue,
312-page publication. Volumes 2 and 3 followed suit, each with
three issues and barely 400 pages of length. But just as Volume 4
brought more law professors than ever before (including authors
from George Washington University and the University of Iowa), so
too did it bring an additional issue.46 Volume 4’s four issues gave
way in Volume 5 to five issues, which remains HLR’s normal
publication output to this day. By the end of the decade, in stark
contrast with the production of earlier years, Volume 10’s five issues
spanned more than 1,200 pages.47

The publication’s swift growth, both in content and in size,
reflected a changing organizational vision, membership, and
structure. As the editors pressed to become ever better, they
implemented changes to realize that objective. And much did
change over the first half-century of the journal’s existence. But one
consistently present and vital piece of the Review’s contents
appeared right from the start, only to grow in prominence as the
years went by.

A Curious Fascination

Among the professional pieces published in Volume 1 was one
with a particularly “non-Texasy” flavor: an article on an exclusively
federal topic titled The Need for the Impartial Expert in Patent
Litigation. Although the article’s central focus was more trial
advocacy than substantive patent theory, the presence of patent law
in Volume 1 foreshadowed intellectual things to come.

Indeed, each of the Review’s first five volumes contained
articles addressing intellectual property and/or entertainment law.
In Volume 2, although the editors declined to publish Arthur
Bishop’s commentary on prophylactics and pesky pests, in its place
they printed his other submission, Fair Use of Copyrighted Books.
Articles on prior restraint in the motion picture industry, the
patentability of inventions, and international licensing agreements