Page 48 - The First Fifty Years
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42 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW
HLR’s members scurried to lift page proofs above the water line
while being themselves trapped in the publication’s below-ground
offices.15
So much for the fun part of the move into the Bates
Building. The salient point is that, in the four decades to come,
Houston Law Review never would get its collective head fully
above-ground and safe from what to this day remain known
euphemistically, in official University of Houston-speak, as
“water intrusions.”
Swelling Numbers
Along with free hot and cold (but mostly cold) running
water, HLR’s transition from the UH main library’s basement
to its larger, albeit still subterranean quarters in the new
College’s buildings, accompanied by substantial growth in the
number of enrolled students (see below), dramatically
increased the journal’s membership, and so offered the Review
new challenges and opportunities.
During Decade 1, enrollment at the College of Law had
shrunk slightly from 501,16 when HLR began operations in
1963–1964, to 485 in 1968–1969, immediately preceding the
College’s move from the center of campus to its new buildings
on UH’s perimeter the following year. When Decade 1 closed
with the publication of Volume 10 in 1972–1973, the expansion
of numbers facilitated by the opening of the Bates Building
was complete, having upped the total student population to
714 in anticipation of the further physical expansion
immediately to come.
A second teaching unit, faithful to the plan of the Bates
Building,17 welcomed its first entering class in the fall of 1975
(although admissions had been ramped up the preceding year
in anticipation of the new addition). The figures on the
following page show the master plan as originally conceived
(although only phases 1 and 2 ultimately would be built).18
Teaching Unit II (“TUII”), so-called because no donor had
been located to take up the new naming opportunity,19 was
designed, like Bates before it, to hold up to 500 students—
complete with their own faculty, carrels, satellite library, and
of course the two subsurface floors, had the scheme to create a
second, distinct “college of law” been carried forward. In the
event, the age of specialization had begun to settle onto the
practice of law as well as into academic curricular offerings.
The plan to foster multiple, almost independent, colleges of
law within the larger school quietly died. 20