Page 24 - The First Fifty Years

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18 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

Review) would elect its first female President, Susan Estrich—
heading up Volume 90.

Marvin Nathan60 served as Managing Editor of Volume 2 and
Editor in Chief of Volume 3. Review members, he recalls, were “few
in number in contrast with the current editorial board,” resulting in
what he regarded as his greatest challenge during the early days of
the publication: “to instill pride and to inspire tradition.”61 The
viewpoint of Nathan’s boards was intensely forward looking, yet
pragmatic and self aware:

The vision of the editorial boards at the time was to try to
change the image of the law [school] as much as we could as
quickly as we could . . . . We wanted, as a group, more
recognition, more approbation, in the community. We were not
so much focused on our standing nationally. That wasn’t as
important as our regional standing.62
Indeed. First things first. Presciently, however, and happily for
HLR’s later national standing, it was Nathan’s Board that
“summarily rejected” Condoms and Cockroaches for publication by
Houston Law Review.
Lawrence (Larry) Pirtle,63 an Associate Editor on Board 3,
remembers conducting the publication’s affairs with Nathan and
others from an office in the Review’s old university library basement
“about the size of a modest-sized closet of today.” Substantively, his
strongest memory is of the “Boys from the Basement”64 publishing
in Volume 3 Solicitor General Cox’s address regarding the
constitutionality of the then-proposed Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The events of the day, he recalls, including those considered in the
pages of Houston Law Review, “raised issues and fundamental
differences which are still echoing (even more loudly) today.”65
Echoing Pirtle, Alvin Zimmerman,66 who served as Managing
Editor on Board 4 under John O’Quinn (see below), recalls his
experience as the first editor to attend a meeting of the National
Conference of Law Reviews. While gratified “because we were
complimented for being such a young law review but . . . having
such a professional publication” (news that “brought . . . high fives
from everyone” when reported back in Houston), Zimmerman
realized that still greater efforts would be required if HLR were to
move up in the ranks.67 “[W]e wanted . . . eventually to be able to
compete with any other major law review,” he recalls. But “to begin
that quest, we needed [to put out] not less than four issues.”68 Board
4, accordingly, did just that.
Probably few members of the Decade 1 boards would contest
that, among any number of extraordinary members of Houston Law