Page 50 - The First Fifty Years

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44 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

David Crump, Richard F. Dole, Jr., James B. Gambrell, Stephen
K. Huber, Raymond T. Nimmer, J. Thomas Oldham, Yale L.
Rosenberg, Ira B. Shepard, and Stephen Zamora would help
establish firmly the Review’s reputation for consistent quality
during Decade 2 and beyond.24 They published in Houston Law
Review not because the hometown journal needed them to fill
pages, as had been true so often during Decade 1, but because by
Decade 2 publication in HLR meant exposure in an increasingly
well-known legal journal to an increasingly broad audience.

A bigger school also meant a bigger Houston Law Review.
Board 1 had consisted of at most 14 members, although in truth
exact numbers for Decade 1 membership are difficult to compute
because of the instability built into the counts by members’
comings and goings (graphically preserved by early volumes in
which the masthead changed with each issue). By contrast,
Board 15—the first fully post-TUII board in the school’s history
because both the 2Ls and the 3Ls had been admitted since that
building’s occupation—consisted of 49 members, an increase in
size of 350%.

By Decade 2’s end in 1982–1983, 39 “candidates” would
join 39 editors on the Board 20 masthead—a sharp increase
from the 30 members and editors, total, who had served on
Board 11.25 During the same decade, the Review nearly
achieved gender parity. By Board 15, total student
membership had become majority female—a first in the
history of the organization.26 For statistics on the top of the
HLR masthead, see “Oddments” below.

The swelling numbers presented to HLR both
opportunities and challenges. How to put so many new
members to good use? How to organize energies and projects
efficiently? What to publish, given the staggering number of
new hands on deck? At least partial answers to these questions
are provided in BEYOND COCKROACHES hereafter.27

But first, a moment to address an issue which had been
present at Houston Law Review’s founding and which, in part
because of the publication’s new numbers and growing
ambition, never really had gone away.

The Small Matter of Financing

Houston Law Review had been founded in 1962 on the
proverbial shoestring. After a request from the Student Bar
Association and with the support of faculty members like A.A.
White and John Mixon, Dean Newell Blakely had approved the
creation of a student journal of academics only after making the