Page 89 - The First Fifty Years

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As originally designed, the Health Law Institute was housed
at the UT Health Science Center and had little to do with the
University of Houston. After Shaw’s departure as director in
1981, the Institute had two additional short-term directors, both
also from the Health Science Center. By 1985, neither UT nor
UH seems to have been particularly satisfied with the Institute’s
arrangements or progress.

Happily, the 1985–1986 academic year at the Law Center
featured a year-long visit to Houston by health law specialists
Mark Rothstein and Laura Rothstein. J.D. graduates from
Georgetown University, they were then teaching at West
Virginia University, where Mark Rothstein directed an
interdisciplinary program at the law and medical schools.

In 1986, the Rothsteins accepted offers to join the University
of Houston Law Center faculty. The existing Health Law
program was renamed the Health Law & Policy Institute, with
Mark Rothstein as its first director. The Institute’s ties with UT
were severed, with what had been a rocky marriage becoming a
most amicable divorce when the two institutions shortly
thereafter renewed their partnership to create a new Doctor of
Jurisprudence/Master in Public Health degree.

All operations moved to the University of Houston campus.
The Golden Age of Health Law at the Law Center had begun.

What followed during the remainder of Decade 3 (and indeed
through the year 2000,20 when Health Law’s direct association
with Houston Law Review through the latter’s publication of
annual Health Law Symposia issues—as described below—
ended) was a dazzling display of program building. Through a
series of multi-year plans, the Health Law & Policy Institute
created, for example, not only its J.D./M.P.H. with the University
of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, but also a J.D./Ph.D.
(in medical humanities and bioethics) with the UT Medical
Branch at Galveston, an LL.M. in Health Law at the University
of Houston, and numerous other cutting-edge academic
programs, including a Health Law Clinic, an intersession course
every January, and a Semester-in-Houston opportunity allowing
students at other law schools to spend time in Houston focused
on the study of the Law Center’s greatly expanded health law
curriculum. Grants from the National Institutes of Health, and
special-item appropriations by the Texas State Legislature for in-
depth critical-issue reports regularly published by Institute
researchers, followed.

In 1994, HLPI students took first place in the National
Health Law Moot Court Competition, and, in its influential