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48 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW
contributors, published Consumer Payment Systems: Leverage
Effects Within an Electronic Funds Transfer Systems,49 presaging
his own later transformation from an expert on commercial
transactions (rapidly electronifying by 1980) into one of the
nation’s foremost scholars in information law. By 1983, as Glenn
J. O’Grady of IBM would report in Protection of Computer
Software—An Update and Practical Synthesis,50 “[t]he computer
software industry [wa]s exploding.”51
The decade ended as it had begun, with numerous
practitioner-oriented pieces filling the pages of the later volumes.
Volume 18 featured articles by attorneys from Vinson & Elkins
and Fulbright & Jaworski on ecological considerations in oil and
gas development and practical considerations with Texas
abortion law. Volume 19 included articles from UH College of
Law professors on property division in Texas divorces, the
regulation of foreign bank operations in Texas, and real property
law in the context of cotenancies. And Volume 20’s Texas Rules of
Evidence Handbook52 rounded out the decade’s Texas-centered
focus by ushering in a publication that continues to this day to be
widely employed by Texas litigators practicing in state court.
Throughout the decade, regardless of the subject matter
treated, the Review strove to assure consistently high quality in
the pages it published. And, albeit with a particular focus on
providing product for the benefit of Texas practitioners, HLR
aimed its sights higher in Decade 2 by beginning to publish the
kinds of “themed issues,” like Perdue’s Medical Malpractice, that
are a hallmark of law review success everywhere.
Themed Issues: The Beginning
Top law reviews regularly host symposia, which result in
published articles written by the symposia’s distinguished
speakers.53 A symposium technically is “a conference or meeting
to discuss a particular subject,” which produces “a collection of
essays or papers . . . by a number of contributors.”54 But other
events—a lecture with commentators, a conference that produces
papers, or even papers generated without any physical gathering
of the participants—likewise may be presented in the pages of a
law review in what, for want of a better term, might be called,
generically, “themed issues.”55
Themed issues bring attention to the organization in the
legal community to which they are directed, give the student
editors an opportunity to plan and execute a professional event,
and (often with the assistance of the law school’s faculty) bring in
top academics from around the country to inform the journal’s