Page 63 - The First Fifty Years

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CARRY ON BOLDLY 57

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At the founding of the American Nation—a moonshot (albeit
of the geopolitical sort) if ever there was one—Benjamin Franklin
was called to answer whether the Framers had established a
republic or a monarchy as the fledgling country’s form of
government. His reply: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”93 Proud of
what he had helped create, still Franklin remained conscious
that much important work lay ahead.

The same sort of inquiry, put perhaps to a newbie faculty
advisor surveying the prospects for survival of what HLR’s
student editors had achieved in Decade 1 of their young
publication’s existence, might have elicited much the same
response as Franklin’s. In its first ten years, the early editors of
Houston Law Review had succeeded in bequeathing to their
successors a stable but modest foundation. The challenge
confronting the editors who would follow in Decade 2 was to build
on that foundation a journal of consistent quality. And that they
did.

Carry on boldly indeed!

1. July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap for Mankind, NASA (July 8, 2009),
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/apollo11_40th.html.

2. Armstrong, the first human to utter the word “Houston” on the moon, went
permanently to the heavens as this essay was in draft. See, e.g., John Noble Wilford, Neil
Armstrong, 1930–2012: Made ‘Giant Leap’ as First Man to Step on Moon, N.Y. TIMES, Aug.
25, 2012, at A1.

3. President John F. Kennedy, Moon Speech at Rice University (Sept. 12 1962),
available at http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm.

4. Craig Joyce, Driven: The First Decade of Houston Law Review, supra, at 8.

5. See generally, e.g., Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, & Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr.,
FIRST ON THE MOON (1970); Andrew Chaikin, A MAN ON THE MOON (1998). The authors of
this essay again thank John Mixon, the John Mixon Society, and HLR alumnus Don R.
Riddle for permission to draw on Professor Mixon’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LAW SCHOOL,
published late in 2012.

6. See Justice Tom C. Clark, Random Thoughts on the Court’s Interpretation of
Individual Rights, 1 HOUS. L. REV. 75 (1963); Justice Tom C. Clark, Reminiscences of an
Attorney General Turned Associate Justice, 6 HOUS. L. REV. 623 (1969).

7. Archibald Cox, The Constitutionality of the Proposed Voting Rights Act of 1965,
3 HOUS. L. REV. 1 (1965). Cox’s article was based on his 1965 address to the Student Bar
Association’s Annual Spring Banquet.

8. By the end of Decade 1, having sidestepped “Condoms and Cockroaches,” see
Joyce, Driven, supra, at 9, the Review was in the business of publishing increasingly
accomplished professors contributing articles on major national topics. Harvard, Stanford,
Pennsylvania, George Washington, U.C. Davis—all had been represented in the later
years of Decade 1.

9. See id. at 22 n.36 (including commentary from Board 1’s Articles Editor that his
“major responsibility was to find some articles [from a relatively narrow] menu of
contributors”).

10. See id. at 9–19.