Page 84 - The First Fifty Years

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78 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

VOILA, A LAW CENTER!

Law, Law, and More Law

It will come as no news to those who lived through the era
that, by the mid to late twentieth century, the increasing
complexity and expanding horizons of American law had pushed
American lawyers to narrow their practices as never before.2
Perhaps it was not inevitable (to judge by faculty lounge
discussions of the era) that law schools would follow suit, but
they did.

Indeed, by the beginning of Houston Law Review’s Decade 3,
the “most important development in legal scholarship” was
“specialization of interest.”3 The “tension between writing and
teaching”4 that had come to a head during the Review’s early
years5 was such that, by the mid-1980s, “the dominant ideology
of the traditional law school community [was] fraying at the
edges.”6

In 1983, just as HLR was beginning its third decade, Yale
law professor George L. Priest, in Social Science Theory and
Legal Education: The Law School as University, described the
dynamic between teaching and theorizing “as the scholar
becom[ing] more theoretically sophisticated, [while] law teaching
in the standard form becomes increasingly remote from his
work.”7 Within the legal academy, “new breeds of professor and
student [were] altering the way the law [was] taught. In response
to the growing complexity of legal practice, faculties [were] also
becoming increasingly specialized.”8

Accordingly, Priest called for a philosophical shift in the way
law schools were structured and the way students were taught.
Under Priest’s “Enlightenment,” law schools would be structured
more like universities, with standard introductory courses
followed by classes “of increasingly narrow scope.”9 Specialization
would arrive shortly, with a vengeance, in legal academia.

Today, 30 years after Priest’s article, the changed legal
landscape wrought by the recent recession (particularly, revised
hiring objectives among some of the nation’s biggest law firms)
has led one commentator to opine in the New York Times that
“[t]he twilight of the generalist law degree is here.”10 As the
history below demonstrates, the University of Houston Law
Center had long since recognized and embraced this decades-long
developing reality.