Page 29 - The First Fifty Years
P. 29

Do Not Delete          1/8/2015 10:14 AM

               DRIVEN  23

the like—require this series of essays to focus primarily on the publication’s articles, which
were drafted by, and credited to, professional authors.

    40. John B. Neibel, Implications of Robinson v. California, 1 HOUS. L. REV. 1, 1 (1963)
(quoting Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660, 667 n.8 (1962)) (internal quotation marks
omitted).

    41. Robinson, 370 U.S. 660.

    42. Reed v. Steamship Yaka, 373 U.S. 410 (1963).

    43. Justice Tom Campbell Clark (b. Dallas, Texas, Sept. 23, 1899; d. New York City,
New York, June 13, 1977) was a Texas lawyer, appointed to the Supreme Court by President
Harry S. Truman, who served as an Associate Justice from 1949 to 1967.

    44. For more detailed information on the subject matter of Decade 1’s contents, see “By
the Numbers,” infra, at 28–35.

    45. “I recall a pervasive sense throughout the tenure of Board 10,” recalls its Editor in
Chief, Jan Baker, “that the Law Review had, in some fundamental way, ‘arrived’ as a scholarly
law school publication.” Thanks to the hard work of their predecessors as well as their own
efforts, the Review “was being increasingly cited by courts and commentators” and the Board
10 editors experienced “an influx of articles that were of increasingly high quality.”
Questionnaire Response, D. Jansing Baker, Latham & Watkins LLP (May 24, 2012)
[hereinafter Baker Questionnaire] (on file with Houston Law Review).

    46. The expansion to four issues per volume was funded by a $35,000 grant, to be paid at
the rate of $7,000 per year over five years, by the Maurice Frankel Foundation; and, not
surprisingly, Issue 3 was dedicated to Frankel. “Financial instability,” the editors noted,
“seems the natural state of law reviews, and no review could long endure without a subsidy of
some kind.” Dedication, 4 HOUS. L. REV. (1966).

    47. The technology used to produce the volumes, however, remained almost
unimaginably primitive by today’s standards. “In the early years of the Law Review, it was
printed on linotype machines. Copy was sent to the printer, and an operator retyped the copy
on a linotype keyboard. The machine then created a line of type called a ‘slug,’ and each slug
was—literally—a line of hot metal.” The labor-intensive character of the process also made
changes “very expensive” and forced the editors to balance “the cost of each change . . . against
[its] importance.” Baker Questionnaire, supra note 45.

             Once the changes were made and the volumes published, there remained, of course,
the question of how to get Houston Law Review noted in the legal world. Board 8 Editor in
Chief Steven Segal relates that, prior to his board’s time in office, HLR had remained
conspicuously absent from notice in Shepard’s Citations. Contacting the publisher, Segal was
informed by Shepard’s that it “would consider our inclusion when there was a demand.” In
response, Dean John Neibel placed in his annual letter to College of Law alumni/ae a message
requesting that they write letters to Shepard’s demanding that henceforth it publish citations
to HLR (or, as many of them apparently added, risk the cancellation of their subscriptions).
“Not long after, we received a letter from Shepard’s advising that our Law Review was going to
be added to their service. We joked in the office that the letter really said, ‘call off the dogs, you
have created the demand.’” Questionnaire Response, Steven Segal, retired partner at Fulbright
& Jaworski L.L.P. (Mar. 20, 2012) (on file with Houston Law Review).

    48. Editor’s Note, 2 HOUS. L. REV. 69, 69 (1965).

    49. KARL N. LLEWELLYN, THE BRAMBLE BUSH 105 (1930).

    50. Id.

    51. By Board 3, students writing onto the Review could choose between drafting a full-
length article or, alternatively, submitting two case notes.

    52. MIXON, supra note 2, at 235.

    53. Ingenious, but flawed. For architectural reasons, the plans called for not only
“basement” floors to all buildings, but “ground” (meaning “sunken into the ground”) floors as
well. The early results, while hardly promising, at least provoked some amusement:

      Professor Dwight Olds had famously predicted that TU 1 [i.e., the Bates College of
      Law building] would flood, no matter how it was designed, because of the fact that it
   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34