Page 21 - The First Fifty Years

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DRIVEN 15

A PERFECT ARISTOCRACY49

Membership and Logistics: An Overview

Fourteen members strong, the pioneer Board of the Houston
Law Review was small in number, though not in achievement. Law
reviews are repopulated annually by their school’s highest
achieving first-year students, and “continued membership is based
on higher performance than is demanded of non-members.”50
Whether selection is based on grades, a writing competition, or a
combination of both, spots are limited.51 And so the 14 members of
Board 1 had much to celebrate—the requisite success required for
initial membership brought about the opportunity to print the
Review’s first pages.

By design and by necessity, the size of a law review is closely
linked to the size of its law school. And the College of Law in 1962
was not large—a few hundred at most. A small law class birthed a
small Law Review board; a small board required a relatively modest
structure, at least by the standards of today.

Board 1 was indeed simply organized: an Editor in Chief,
supported by a single Articles Editor, Comment Editor, Casenote
Editor, Book Review Editor, and Business Manager, with a
population rounded out by eight members of the Editorial Staff. No
Managing Editor, no Chief Articles Editor, and certainly no Alumni
Developments Editor (there being, obviously, no alumni to develop).
But as the Review labored along through the remainder of Decade
1, the membership structure would evolve annually.

The position of Managing Editor was added by Board 2 and
remained a constant thereafter. But beyond that, few masthead
changes made during those early years were permanent. Board 6
took a bifurcated approach: there were Editors of Student
Writings and Editors of Non-Student Writings (but very little
else). By Board 7, they had become, respectively, Casenote and
Comment Editors and Articles Editors. Board 8 introduced the
title of “Members.” And at the end of the decade, Board 10 did
away with Associate Editors, instead crediting them on the
masthead simply as Editors.

The main constant was a limited size throughout most of the
decade: 14 members of Board 1, down to 10 by Board 6, but rising
slightly to 11 on Board 7 and 13 on Board 8. What would it take
for the Review to grow, given its insistence on asking only a small
percentage of each class into membership?

The answer? The law school itself would have to grow. And
grow it did.