After publishing an article critical of Israel, Columbia Law Review’s website is shut down by board
NEW YORK — Student editors at the Columbia Law Review say they have been pressured by the journal’s board of directors to stop publication of an academic article written by a Palestinian human rights lawyer accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and maintaining an apartheid regime.
When the editors refused the request and published the piece on Monday morning, the board, consisting of teachers and alumni of Columbia University Law School – close the Law Review website completely. It remained offline Tuesday evening, a static homepage informing visitors that the domain is “under maintenance.”
The episode in one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious law journals marks the latest flashpoint in an ongoing debate over academic language that has deeply divided students, staff and university administrators since the early 1990s. Israel-Hamas war.
Several editors of the Columbia Law Review described the board’s intervention as an unprecedented violation of the editorial independence of the journal, which is run by Columbia Law School students. The board of directors oversees the nonprofit’s finances but historically has had no role in selecting pieces.
In a letter sent to student editors on Tuesday and shared with The Associated Press, the board of directors said it was concerned that the article, titled “Nakba as a Legal Concept,” did not have the “usual processes of review or selection of articles run through’. at the Law Review, and especially that a number of student editors were unaware of its existence.”
“To maintain the status quo and provide student editors with some opportunity to review the piece, and to give the Law Review time to determine how to proceed, we have temporarily suspended the website,” the letter continued.
Those involved in requesting and editing the piece said they had followed a rigorous review process, even as they acknowledged they had taken steps to avoid the expected backlash by limiting the number of students aware of the article .
In the piece, Rabea Eghbariah, a PhD candidate at Harvard, accuses Israel of a litany of “crimes against humanity,” calling for a new legal framework to “encapsulate the ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine and provide a legal formulation of the Palestinian situation. ”
Eghbariah said in a text message that the suspension of the law journal’s website should be seen as “a microcosm of a broader authoritarian repression taking place on American campuses.”
The editors said they voted overwhelmingly in December to commission a piece on Palestinian legal issues, then formed a smaller committee — open to all of the publication’s editorial leaders — that ultimately accepted Eghbariah’s article. He had submitted an earlier version of the article to the Harvard Law Review, which later decided not to publish it amid internal backlash, according to a report in The Intercept.
Anticipating a similar controversy and concerned about the draft leaking, the committee of editors who worked on the article did not upload it to a server visible to the law journal’s wider membership and to some administrators. The piece was only shared with the entire staff of the Columbia Law Review on Sunday – something the editors said was not unusual.
“We have never distributed a particular article in advance,” says Sohum Pal, articles editor at the publication. “So the idea that this is all a process issue is a total lie. It is very transparent, content-based.”
In their letter to students, the board said student editors who did not work on the piece should have been given the opportunity to read it and express their concerns.
“Whatever your views on this piece, it will clearly be controversial and may have an impact on everyone associated with the Review,” they wrote.
Those involved in the publication of the article said they heard from a small group of students over the weekend who expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if it were published.
Some alluded to trucks circled Columbia and other campuses following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, in which students were labeled anti-Semites due to their past or current ties to groups considered hostile to Israel.
The board’s letter also suggested adding a statement to the piece stating that the article had not been subject to a standard review process and had not been made available in advance to all student editors.
Erika Lopez, an editor who worked on the piece, said many students were strongly opposed to the idea, calling it “completely incorrect to suggest that we were not following the standard process.”
She said student editors had spoken regularly since receiving criticism from the administration on Sunday and remained firmly in support of the piece.
When they heard the website was closed Monday morning, they quickly uploaded Eghbariah’s article to a publicly accessible website. It has since spread widely through social media.
“It’s really ironic that this piece probably got more attention than anything we normally published,” Lopez added, “even after they took down the website.”