Page 71 - The First Fifty Years

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ODDMENTS 65

ODDMENTS

More Ephemera. Joining “Off the Record” and “Current
Materials,” which had gone to law review heaven during Decade
1, Decade 2 saw the dispatch of “Books Received,” “Books Noted,”
“Books Annotated,” and “Recent Developments” to the growing
graveyard of late but not lamented features from HLR’s early
years.

More Romances. Ah, HLR as a labor of love! Could it be that,
somewhere in the course of Decade 2, a member and a secretary
at the Review met and married? Hint: unless the masthead lies,
the following year HLR resumed its labors sans a secretary.

A Continuing Cover Story. The ‘60s-era designers of the new
College of Law buildings had envisaged a massive complex of five
teaching units, holding up to 2,500 budding lawyers at a time—
symbolized by the “five-cornered copper snowflake” which first
began to adorn the cover of the Review in Volume 6. Following
the opening of TUII in 1975 and the realization that America’s
appetite for ever-more attorneys was not in fact insatiable, plans
for further construction were halted. After the publication of the
last number of Volume 15 in 1978, the HLR snowflake quietly
melted away.

Best Left Under Covers. Rumors persist that, during the
tenure of one of the Decade 2 boards, continuing developments in
obscenity law, both in the nation’s highest court and at the state
legislature, required the maintenance of a stash of appropriate
research materials within HLR’s offices. Any such reports are of
course difficult to confirm from reliable sources, and all such
work would of course have been strictly in the line of duty.

Clearly (En)titled. What’s in a name? The competition for
best article title in Decade 2 proved to be less stiff than in Decade
1, but (in the spirit of the Oscars, where nobody is an actual
“winner”) the award goes to: Roy Ryden Anderson, Coercive
Collection and Exempt Property in Texas: A Debtor’s Paradise or
a Living Hell?, 13 HOUS. L. REV. 84 (1975) (considering just what
it sounds like, in 49 scintillating pages).

Mission(s) Accomplished. Dwight Olds, who had published
14 articles during Decade 1 and helped Houston Law Review
greatly to establish itself as a going concern, retired from the
faculty shortly thereafter and never returned to the journal’s
pages. As Decade 2 progressed, A.A. White, too, retired from the