Page 46 - The First Fifty Years

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40 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

The journey to the moon had begun several years earlier
when President John F. Kennedy announced, on September 12,
1962, also in Houston:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the
moon in this decade and do the other things [which JFK
had pledged that day], not because they are easy, but
because they are hard, because that goal will serve to
organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,
because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept,
one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend
to win . . .3
Houston Law Review’s journey had begun in 1962 as well.4
Whereas Kennedy had committed the United States to go to the
moon, the students and faculty who began HLR had committed
to something infinitely more modest: starting up a student-run
and edited journal of law. But while the President and NASA
could bring to their chosen task the resources of an entire nation,
the founders of HLR could summon only the meager assets of a
local Houston law school—and their own “Driven” determination.
Both the nation and the Law Review would meet the
challenges that faced them in their respective first decades—the
United States within the calendar decade promised by President
Kennedy, the Review with the publication of its tenth volume in
1972–1973. Neither goal would be achieved without struggle and
sacrifice.
The saga of humankind’s first venture to another world has
been chronicled ably elsewhere.5
This is the story of Decade 2 of Houston Law Review.

***

GROWTH AND CHANGE

Like any teenager, HLR had in its youth enjoyed many
moments on which it could look back fondly. There had been in
Decade 1, for example, not one but two articles by a Justice of the
Supreme Court of the United States, Tom C. Clark, who
fortuitously hailed from Texas.6 Also fortuitously, a Solicitor
General of the United States, Archibald Cox, had delivered an
address to another College of Law organization, and Houston
Law Review had published it.7 Nor were those the only notable
successes during the Review’s first decade.8

Still, the pickings for a start-up journal always are thin9
and, although HLR had made much of its own good fortune,
quality had been uneven. The early years necessarily laid the