Page 94 - The First Fifty Years

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88 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

Rules of Evidence Handbook. The Review published its first-ever
lecture series and a mutually beneficial relationship with the
nascent Health Law Institute began to emerge. Meanwhile, HLR
fostered its commitment to publishing relevant content for the
Texas bar while simultaneously attracting the best and the
brightest authors from the national academic community.

Business as Usual: A Potpourri
Before there was the Frankel Lecture Series of Decade 4, the
Annual IPIL Symposium issues of Decade 5, or even the Butler &
Binion Lecture Series of the mid-1980s,57 the Review’s prestige
hinged not only on the growing number of themed issues filling
its pages,58 but just as importantly on the contributions of the
authors who published with HLR outside of a symposium, special
project, or themed issue of any kind. HLR, by its own merits, was
attracting top-notch authors. The presence of these authors,
whom the editors worked tirelessly to recruit, lent credibility to
Houston Law Review and contributed to the creation of an
academic environment that would be necessary for future
symposia and lectures to take off.
The authors of Volume 24 exemplify the impact. Although
the jewel of the volume appeared in Issue 1, which included some
of the top legal minds in America participating in an
environmental law conference (see the detailed participants in
Beyond Just “Themed Issues” below), contributions from
nonconference participants in subsequent issues included
professors from Rutgers, North Carolina, and Cincinnati.
One measure of a law review’s success is the company its
published authors keep. By that measure, HLR was firmly seated
at the grown-ups’ table by midway through its third decade. In
Volume 24, for example, Professor Earl Maltz of Rutgers
published Reconstruction Without Revolution: Republican Civil
Rights Theory in the Era of the Fourteenth Amendment. 59 He was
joined by Cincinnati law professor James T. O’Reilly’s
Biotechnology Meet Products Liability: Problems Beyond the State
of the Art.60 Shortly before Maltz’s publication with HLR he had
appeared in Texas Law Review, and immediately after his
Volume 24 article he went on to publish with the law reviews at
Duke and North Carolina. Similarly, O’Reilly’s immediately
preceding and following scholarship took him to the law journals
at Vanderbilt, Ohio State, Harvard, Yale, and Cornell. Houston
Law Review was in good company indeed.