Page 22 - The First Fifty Years

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16 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

Newell Blakely, it will be recalled, had embraced A.A. White’s
ambition to build or buy space for a downtown law building. While
their motives may have differed (both getting out of the cramped
university library basement and getting closer to the practicing bar
and the judiciary featured in each man’s vision, though in differing
measure), Blakely and White’s efforts produced exactly the same
result: nothing.

Their successor, John Neibel, proved a better institutional
politician than either. In 1966, the University announced that it
would fund a law building—on campus. The promise helped gain
the College of Law membership in the Association of American Law
Schools.52 And it opened up the prospect of a greatly expanded
student body, with concomitant results for the membership of
Houston Law Review, through an ingenious53 hub-and-satellite
design, including a projected five teaching units (and an
underground library) capable of accommodating up to 2,500
students, if ever completely built.

As the first (and still only) two teaching units rose and became
occupied in 1969 and 1975, the school’s enrollment skyrocketed.
Increased enrollment led, in turn, to a larger Review (an important
development, considering that the page length per HLR volume had
quadrupled from Volume 1 to Volume 10). By Board 10,
membership had risen to 30.

The growing number of members did not immediately produce
a notably more sophisticated Editorial Board structure. Members
and Editors comprised 80% of Board 10. They were led by an Editor
in Chief and a Managing Editor, along with two Article Editors and
two Comment and Casenote Editors. But if the hierarchical
organization of the Review remained somewhat thin, the addition of
many additional hands at least made easier the processes of
reviewing submissions, selecting articles, editing galley proofs, and
printing five issues per volume.

Along with arduous labor, membership on Houston Law
Review (or any law review) carries with it many benefits as well.
The success, the prestige, and the responsibility accompanying law
review membership really never changes. Famed scholar (and Yale
Law Journal Editor in Chief) Karl Llewellyn encouraged first-year
law students concerning the merits of attaining membership in his
school’s most elite student organization thus:

We have in law schools an aristocracy of a peculiar kind. We
may almost say it is a perfect aristocracy. One achieves
membership exclusively in terms of his performance.
Membership carries honor, but the honor that it carries is the
duty to work and slave and drive oneself as no other student is