After the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors responded to the publication of an article about Palestine by taking the prestigious journal completely offline, the students who run CLR voted on Wednesday to reject an offer in a letter from the directors to reinstate the website.
The Columbia Law School students that run CLR were considering a proposal to append a note to the Palestine article disclaiming what the directors, in an unsigned letter to students, described as “secrecy and deviation from the Review’s usual processes.” In the letter proposing the text, the board of directors said it wanted to see the journal put back online.
The student editors rejected the deal for a disclaimer by a 20-5 vote, according to a student and documentation reviewed by The Intercept.
“To the extent that they’re trying to censor Rabea, that simply won’t happen — that simply hasn’t happened and can’t.”
“I think that this whole year, and particularly this last semester, has been about students recognizing, stepping into their power,” said Sohum Pal, a CLR articles editor. “And I’m very glad that the law students at the law review are doing the same.”
When the article on Palestine, titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” was published on Monday morning, Rabea Eghbariah became the first Palestinian legal scholar to publish in CLR. But within hours of publication, after months of revisions on the lengthy piece, the board of directors took the journal’s website completely offline, saying they had concerns about the process. As of Wednesday evening, Columbia Law Review’s website remained offline.
“Powerful legal scholarship cannot be silenced,” said Pal. “It’s already been circulating. It’s already gotten far more views or reads than the average law review article. And, yeah, to the extent that they’re trying to censor Rabea, that simply won’t happen — that simply hasn’t happened and can’t.”
The Intercept was not immediately able to reach members or representatives of the CLR board of directors, which oversees the independent, nonprofit student-led publication, for comment about the vote or the letter.
After voting, the students sent an email to board of directors member Gillian Metzger, a Columbia law professor, saying that if the board continues to hinder the publication of Eghbariah’s piece, the staff of CLR will stop all work on the journal. (Metzger did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The website takedown was the latest in a battle on Columbia’s campus — and on campuses across the country — over free speech and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Protests erupted on many of the campuses over Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, including at least 15,000 children. At Columbia and other universities, demonstrators were met with brutal police violence.
Disputes over the Gaza war Palestine more broadly have spilled into many aspects of university life, with pro-Palestine students often facing consequences ranging from censure, expulsion, and even censorship — including at well-respected academic journals. In November, the Harvard Law Review voted to kill an online article, also by Eghbariah, that had gone through the full editing process.
On Tuesday, the day after The Intercept published its story on the directors’ initial suppression of Eghbariah’s piece, student editors said they received a letter sent on behalf of the board of directors that offered what it said was “the best way to further the many important values at stake.” The proposal in the board letter required that the following statement be attached to Eghbariah’s piece:
“Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept was not subject to the usual processes of review and editing at the Law Review. It was solicited outside of the usual articles selection process and edited and substantiated by a limited number of student editors. Contrary to ordinary practice, it was not made available for all student editors to read. As a result, a number of student editors were unaware of the piece and did not have the usual opportunity to provide input on its content prior to its publication.”
Some of the student editors who worked on Eghbariah’s piece took exception to the directors’ demand. “The letter communicates the Board’s continued stance to usurp and interfere with the student-run editorial process,” Erika Lopez, one of the editors, told The Intercept on Wednesday. “The Board’s seemingly final decision to include a disclaimer is offensive and unprecedented.”
“The letter communicates the Board’s continued stance to usurp and interfere with the student-run editorial process.”
The letter also suggested additional measures, including taking the “article” label away from piece, since it wasn’t facilitated by the articles committee, and soliciting a response to it. Students had previously told The Intercept that CLR’s student administrative board made a unanimous procedural vote to create a committee for shepherding a piece on Palestine and that a vote on whether or not to solicit a piece to create an opt-in committee to edit it also passed overwhelmingly.
The Wednesday letter, delivered to students unsigned and not on letterhead, said the board of directors had been “informed that this piece had not been subject to the usual processes of review or selection for articles at the Law Review, and in particular that a number of student editors had been unaware of its existence until two days before.”
“The secrecy that surrounded this article’s editing and substantiation review is unacceptable,” the directors’ letter said. “It is also unprecedented, in that every piece is either worked on by, or available on request to, all student editors during the editing process.”
The letter also raised questions about the “adequacy of the editing and substantiation processes” in light of the purported secrecy.
“We elected to use a different internal communications policy for the piece; we did not use a different editing process,” one of the editors, who requested anonymity to avoid reprisals, told The Intercept on Wednesday.
Any suggestion that the internal communications policy was a result of a deficient editing process is not accurate and is offensive to the article, the author, and our editorial team.
According to student editors who spoke with The Intercept on Monday, the draft was stored on a server accessible only to the opt-in editors of the article due to concerns about leaks. These editors mentioned that they were unaware of any previous request by the board to distribute a draft to the full membership of CLR.
In a statement given to The Intercept on Monday, CLR’s board of directors, comprising distinguished alumni and Columbia professors, explained that they had asked for a delay in the article’s publication so that its content could be shared with the entire journal membership, consisting of approximately 100 students. The delay was granted.
However, when news about the article started to spread beyond the CLR community, the students responsible for its production decided to publish the entire May volume of the journal online. In response, the directors took down the entire law review website. In their statement to The Intercept on Monday, the directors stated, “In order to allow the Law Review time to determine the next steps, we have temporarily suspended its website.”
Although the website remains offline, some CLR students see their actions as a triumph.
“I feel immensely grateful and proud of my colleagues for taking a meaningful and principled stand tonight,” said Pal, the articles editor. “I am usually cautious, but I also strive to maintain optimism. We have been telling each other during this past day that optimism may require a touch of delusion, and I believe that it is truly significant right now to be deluded enough to believe in victory and then achieve it.”
