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hardship.51 With multiple boards publishing nearly twice the
number of pages per volume as in prior years, the production of
larger and larger volumes “had imposed a great financial strain
on the Review.”52 Midway through Decade 3, with rising costs
and funding from the school trickling away, Chairman of the
Board of Directors Jan Baker was prompted to warn at the fall
1985 Board Meeting: “[T]he Review is on a dangerous path.”53
Happily, by Decade 3’s conclusion, the skies over HLR’s
finances would brighten yet again. Coming to the rescue once
more was the Evidence Handbook, this time with the printing of
its second edition. (See below for more information on “Cathy
Cochran’s Evidence.”) By the end of the decade, HLR’s hand-to-
mouth worries had been eliminated through good planning and
good fortune. So financially successful was the Handbook that
the incumbent dean, Robert L. Knauss, perhaps on the theory
that no good deed should go unpunished, set as a goal for the
Law Review that it become fully self-sufficient54—maybe a long
shot early in Decade 3, but an accomplished reality in 2013.
BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA
As Houston Law Review moved from the “teenagerhood” of
Decade 2 into the challenges of “twenty-somethingness” in
Decade 3, many young-adult crises of identity and going-forward
choices loomed. With apologies55 to a fellow member of the
academy, see Stewart Macaulay, Bambi Meets Godzilla:
Reflections on Contracts Scholarship and Teaching vs. State
Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices and Consumer Protection
Statutes, 26 HOUS. L. REV. 575 (1989), it seems useful to
appropriate a portion of his title here. “Bambi Meets Godzilla”
describes aptly the difficulties faced by Houston Law Review as
the happy intentions of its “Carry on Boldly” era gave way to the
realities of ratcheting up the Review’s ambitions to accommodate
the increased complexity of legal practice and scholarship and
the galloping diversification of the new Law Center’s faculty and
institutional structures, including its specialized institutes,
centers, and programs.
Nonetheless, as HLR made the transition from its Bambi
days to its Godzilla days, evidence abounds in the pages of the
Review that the organization was continuing its upward
trajectory. Familiar faces returned in Decade 3, as the Review’s
dedicated faculty advisor, G. Sidney Buchanan, led off for the
hometown journal in Volume 2156 and Board 21 Editor in Chief
Cathy Herasimchuk authored Volume 30’s update to the Texas