South Texas College of Law – Houston
Texas
1923
The original school colors of South Texas College of Law were navy blue and white, but in the 1960s the board of directors changed them to crimson and gold. In 2016 the school renamed itself the “Houston College of Law” and modified its colors to crimson and white. Because the name and colors implied an affiliation that did not actually exist with the University of Houston (whose school colors are scarlet and white), the university filed a lawsuit against the law school for trademark infringement. A federal judge placed a temporary injunction on the name and color changes, so to resolve the lawsuit before it went to court the law school’s board of directors voted to change the name of the school back to “South Texas College of Law”, add “Houston” to the end of the name, and change the school’s colors to crimson, gold, and navy blue.
Apparently the South Texas College of Law designed its own hood lining pattern in the 1950s without informing the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) described the hood lining as blue, with a “white pile (triangle) rising from the base of the hood to a point at the bottom of the v-neckband”. A 1972 IBAC list seems to have borrowed its information from Sheard and simply stated that the college’s hood lining was blue with a white triangle. An original academic hood from this period has not been found, so it has not been possible to confirm the appearance of this rather strange-sounding design. (It may have been nothing more than a “per reversed chevron” pattern, inaccurately communicated to Sheard.)
In any case, that hood used the original navy blue and white colors of the college, so here the hood lining for South Texas College of Law – Houston has been redesigned to incorporate the school’s new colors of crimson, gold, and navy blue in a more conventional pattern with an inverted chevron that echoes the original design from the 1950s. The reversed chevron also distinguishes this hood from a similar hood the Bureau assigned to Blue Mountain College in Mississippi in the 1950s or 1960s.
