Page 64 - The First Fifty Years

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58 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

11. Roughly translated from Latin, “in situ” means “in place” or “in its natural
situation.” Thus, the text that follows relates Houston Law Review to its setting as part of
the University of Houston College of Law.

12. See Joyce, Driven, supra, at 21 n.15.
13. As previously discussed, see id. at 21 n.8 (reviewing the evidence as found in
HLR’s own pages), whether the entire building complex ever was meant to be named
“Bates College of Law” remains ambiguous, at least in HLR’s pages.

14. See id. 23–24 n.53.
15. Questionnaire Response, Nancy Taylor Reed Shivers, Partner, Shivers &
Shivers (Oct. 12, 2012) [hereinafter Shivers Questionnaire] (on file with Houston Law
Review). For most of its first 32 years in the new buildings that first opened in 1969, HLR
was quartered on the Ground Floor of the Bates Building, although Board 20 was forced
to move temporarily to the Basement of the Law Library when, in the early years of the
1980s, the lower floors of Bates were rebuilt completely in an attempt to overcome
recurrent flooding. E-mail from Edward P. Watt, Founder & President, Watt Law Firm, to
Craig Joyce, Andrews Kurth Professor of Law, University of Houston Law Center (Oct.
22, 2012) (on file with Houston Law Review). In 2001, after the devastation of Tropical
Storm Allison (see forthcoming Decade Four essay), Houston Law Review and all other
student organizations took over the entirety of the former (now repurposed) Library
Basement on a permanent basis.

16. E-mail from Derrick Gabriel, Director of Student Affairs, University of Houston,
to Craig Joyce, Andrews Kurth Professor of Law, University of Houston Law Center (Oct.
29, 2012) (on file with Houston Law Review).

17. Even the south-facing orientation of BLB’s large picture windows, designed for
the edification of the faculty who would occupy them, was adopted in toto for TUII—oddly
so, however, given that whereas the Bates Building faculty looked onto a large lawn and
back toward the main campus, the vista from the new teaching unit’s faculty windows
featured as its main view not the grove on the new building’s own north side but rather
the decidedly less attractive north side of Bates—a blank concrete wall.

18. John Mixon, Orderly Law School Expansion—The Houston Satellite Plan, 19 J.
LEGAL EDUC. 82, 87 (1966).

19. Nor does it appear that Colonel Bates himself ever had done so, although clearly
he played a key role in University of Houston history, having largely shepherded UH
through the Legislature from private to public status. See MIXON, supra note 5, at 369
(citing PATRICK J. NICHOLSON, IN TIME: ANECDOTAL HISTORY OF THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON 446 (1977)).

20. In keeping with the original design for the complex, the colleges would have
shared a main library and a large facility containing both general administrative offices
and an auditorium. Both of those buildings, along with Bates, had been erected as part of
the original construction in the ‘60s. But other than a new monumental entrance, nothing
whatsoever has been built since TUII.

21. Today, the now renamed University of Houston Law Center (see Decade 3 for
details of the renaming) has reversed course and reduced significantly the size of its
entering class. The reasons for and specifics of that process are not relevant here, but they
do suggest that the history which follows was not inevitable.

22. Apparently almost at a loss to imagine what use to make of so many warm
bodies, HLR in 1978 found time to publish a cumulative index of its first 14 volumes.

23. MIXON, supra note 5, app. 8.

24. Other Decade 2 hires, like Jordan Paust, published frequently in Houston Law
Review’s sister review, Houston Journal of International Law, because of their scholarly
specialties. Still other hires of the period, including Richard Alderman, John Jay
Douglass, Michael A. Olivas, Robert P. Schuwerk, Irene Merker Rosenberg, and
Jacqueline Lang Weaver would publish extensively elsewhere during the remaining three
decades of HLR’s first 50 years and/or contribute significantly in creating the institutes,
programs, and centers, which, as explained in the next essay in this series, would impact