Soon after Columbia Law Review published Rabea Eghbariah’s “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” they were blindsided by a unilateral decision by their Board of Directors scorched earth approach of taking the entire website offline to prevent the article being read. That didn’t work of course, it just encouraged the article to be sent out by other means, much like when Harvard Law nixed Eghbariah’s first essay. The intervention has also prompted Columbia Law Review’s board of student editors to strike. From Columbia Spectator:
The Columbia Law Review administrative board of student editors voted on Thursday to begin a strike, according to documents obtained by Spectator. The motion passed with 20 votes in favor, five opposed, and two abstentions.
The strike came after the review’s board of directors shut down the review’s website on Monday in response to the publication of the article “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept” by Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School. On Thursday, the board of directors relaunched the website, adding at the bottom of the front page a statement regarding Eghbariah’s article, in which it wrote that it received reports that the article went through a “secretive” editing process.
The editors are demanding the removal of the disclaimer statement and total editorial independence from the board of directors.
Before you send emails about how extreme of an ask editorial independence is, you should know that that was the norm before the Board nuked a website over the misdirection that everyone didn’t read the paper before publication… which was also an aberration of the normal publication process. Jamie Jenkins, the editor for Eghbariah’s article, provided some insight:
“The board of directors has never told us what to publish, and has never told us to pull a piece and has never pulled our website, or threatened to do the same,”…“There’s no process or requirement that every single piece that’s published for the law review is up for discussion with the entirety of the law review as to whether it’s going to be published,”[.]
While it is worth noting that the website and Eghbariah’s article are now up, there was about a 2 hour delay between the former and the latter. The exact consequences of the student strike remain unclear, but it may send a message not only to Columbia Law Review’s Board, but to other law reviews that are threatened with strict oversight.
Earlier: This Is The Actual Campus Censorship The Free Speech People Should Be Worried About
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
