Page 56 - The First Fifty Years

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50 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

professor from the University of Albuquerque to publish Defining
the Role of the Physician: Medical Education, Tradition, and the
Legal Process;60 and Jim Perdue produced An Analysis of the
Physician’s Professional Liability for Radiation of the Fetus.61

Volume 16’s Energy Symposium, hosted in 1979, featured
articles by several Washington, D.C., energy practitioners,
current and former divisional directors of the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, and a professor of law from Tulane
University. In Volume 17’s Energy Conference, hosted in 1980,
participants included a Washington, D.C., energy practitioner, an
attorney licensed in Minnesota, New York, and Texas, the
general counsel to a Houston-area energy company, the chief
economist of a Pittsburgh-based energy company, and a partner
at the Houston office of Vinson & Elkins. And in Volume 18’s
energy-themed issue (separate from the Energy Conference
itself), articles were contributed from a University of Texas
School of Law professor, an attorney at Vinson & Elkins, a
project manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, a professor of economics from the University of
Nebraska, and others. The widespread energy-induced malaise of
the 1970s and 1980s was addressed front and center by the
Review’s editors, who had the foresight to understand the
importance of the city’s namesake legal journal bringing together
expert commentators to propose solutions to the nation’s many
energy problems.62

Taken together, Volumes 15–18 demonstrate the many
capabilities of Decade 2—a focus on coal and the nation’s future
in Volume 15, federal regulation of the energy industry in
Volume 16, legal issues within the international energy market
in Volume 17, and various matters related to the economics of oil
leasing and the ecological impact of mineral exploration in
Volume 18. Throughout these volumes, as well as all of the other
volumes of Decade 2 containing themed issues, HLR
demonstrated its desire to serve the Texas Bar by publishing
practical content alongside nationally relevant articles that
would contribute to the Review’s climb into the upper-echelon of
U.S. law journals. Reliance on themed issues quickly would
become one of the primary ways that Houston Law Review
projected itself onto the national stage in the coming years.63

And arguably it saved the most important of the themed
issues for last.