Page 47 - The First Fifty Years

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CARRY ON BOLDLY 41

framework for the “blast off” that would ultimately propel the
journal to heights unimaginable in the early 1960s. But the first
volumes of Decade 1, in particular, were populated frequently by
what a neutral observer today might categorize as “filler” pages.
“Books Received,” “Index of Current Material of Interest from
Other Reviews,” and other such sections provided the Review the
opportunity to flesh out its pages with lists of whatever books
had appeared somehow in the HLR inbox and references to what
scholars in other journals were publishing. Interesting reads, no
doubt, but not the kind of scholarly analysis that major national
law journals publish. Then, too, and with notable exceptions duly
celebrated in Driven: The First Decade of Houston Law Review,10
many pages in the early volumes had, of necessity, been occupied
by pieces from local practitioners and College of Law professors
writing on matters of relatively narrow interest.

In Decade 1, survival had been paramount. The product had
been variable. What would be the next step? The answer, in the
famously cheerful injunction of HLR’s young faculty advisor,
Sidney Buchanan (of whom much more hereafter): “Carry on
boldly!”

HLR in Situ11

Throughout its “teenagerhood,” Houston Law Review of
course remained under the parental wing of the University of
Houston College of Law. That single fact was fraught with many
consequences. We deal immediately with only the first and most
obvious of those impacts.

HLR had been born in the womb of the University of
Houston’s main library. It was a small place, and periodically
damp.12

The opening in 1969 of the first of the law school’s three new
buildings—including (along with the library and an
administration/auditorium structure) the building that housed
Bates, the school’s first of an intended five “colleges of law”13—
brought some relief. The new building had two authentically
above-ground floors called First (or BLB-1st) and Second (BLB-
2d), but also a suspiciously named “Ground Floor” which was in
fact sunk halfway into what appeared to be the water course of a
sometime tributary of nearby Brays Bayou, plus a fully
underground “Basement.” Flooding was a regular event in the
new buildings, and the results sometimes comical, what with
water-logged elevators going up and down, up and down,
mindlessly opening their doors at every level and offering free
firework displays to amused observers.14 On at least one occasion,