Columbia Law Review Board Nukes Website Over Palestine Article

Last November, the Harvard Law Review made the unprecedented decision to kill a fully edited essay prior to publication. The author, human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah, was to be the first Palestinian legal scholar published in the prestigious journal.

As The Intercept reported at the time, Eghbariah’s essay – an argument for establishing “Nakba,” the expulsion, dispossession, and oppression of Palestinians, as a formal legal concept that widens its scope – faced extraordinary editorial scrutiny and eventual censorship.

When the Harvard publication spiked his article, editors from another Ivy League law school reached out to Eghbariah. Students from the Columbia Law Review solicited a new article from the scholar and, upon receiving it, decided to edit it and prepare it for publication.

Now, eight months into Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, Eghbariah’s work has once again been stifled – this time by the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors, a group of law school professors and prominent alumni that oversee the students running the review.

Eghbariah’s paper for the Columbia Law Review, or CLR, was published on its website in the early hours of Monday morning. The journal’s board of directors responded by pulling the entire website offline. The homepage on Monday morning read “Website under maintenance.”

According to Eghbariah, he worked with editors at the Columbia Law Review for over five months on the 100-plus page text.

“The attempts to silence legal scholarship on the Nakba by subjecting it to an unusual and discriminatory process are not only reflective of a pervasive and alarming Palestine exception to academic freedom,” Eghbariah told The Intercept, “but are also a testament to a deplorable culture of Nakba denialism.”

Website Takedown

Seven editors who had worked on the article told The Intercept that, over the weekend, members of the board of directors pressured the law review’s leadership to delay and even rescind publication. Most of the CLR editors spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, fearing the backlash that others have faced for speaking out for Palestine.

Numerous editors stressed that the editorial input had been extensive, and that the text was more widely circulated among a greater number of people than is the case prior to the publication for most CLR articles.

After a back-and-forth with the board and fellow editors, the members of CLR responsible for the Eghbariah article said they feared that the draft had been leaked and decided to preempt outside pressure by publishing the issue online in the early morning hours of June 3. After the editors declined a board of directors request to take down the articles, the board pulled the plug on the entire website.

The CLR board of directors told The Intercept in a statement that there were concerns about “deviation from the Review’s usual processes” and said it had taken the website down to give all CLR members the chance to read the article and that the decision was not a final decision on publication.

“I don’t suspect that they would have asserted this kind of control had the piece been about Tibet, Kashmir, Puerto Rico, or other contested political sites.”

“We spoke to certain members of the student leadership to ask that they delay publication for a few days so that, at a minimum, the manuscript could be shared with all student editors, to provide them with a chance to read it and respond,” the board said. “Nevertheless, we learned this morning that the manuscript had been made public. In order to provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed, we have temporarily suspended its website.”

The apparent intervention by the board of directors surprised some Columba Law School faculty.

“I don’t suspect that they would have asserted this kind of control had the piece been about Tibet, Kashmir, Puerto Rico, or other contested political sites,” Katherine Franke, a professor, told The Intercept.

“When Columbia Law Professor Herbert Weschler published his important article questioning the underlying justification for Brown v. Board of Education in 1959 it was regarded by many as blasphemous, but is now regarded as canonical. This is what legal scholarship should do at its best, challenge us to think hard about hard things, even when it is uncomfortable doing so.”

“Completely Unprecedented”

The article significantly expands on Eghbariah’s argument for Nakba as its own legal concept in international law. The scholarship is aimed at creating a legal framework for the Nakba similar to genocide and apartheid, which were concretized as crimes in response to specific atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany and white-ruled South Africa, respectively.

“The piece fills a conspicuous gap in legal literature with doctrinal, historical, and moral clarity,” said Margaret Hassel, the Columbia Law Review’s previous editor in chief until last February. “I am tremendously proud of the work, care, and thought that Eghbariah and the Review’s editors have poured into the piece.”

“I was just sick to my stomach and disgusted that, once again, this was happening.”

The Columbia Law Review is a separate nonprofit from Columbia University, but the editors are Columbia Law students and its oversight includes law school faculty. The board of directors consists of established faculty members and eminent alumni of the law school. Among the most well-known of the board members are Columbia Law School Dean Gillian Lester; Columbia law professor Gillian Metzger, who also serves in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and Department of Justice senior counsel Lewis Yelin.

Board interventions in editorial content are, the editors said, extremely rare.