The Columbia Law Review, one of the United States’ most prestigious student-edited law journals, had its website taken offline on Monday by its board of directors after the publication of an article arguing that Palestinians are living under a “brutally sophisticated structure of oppression” by Israel that amounts to a crime against humanity.
As of Tuesday evening, the website displayed only a message stating “Website is under maintenance.”
This decision to suspend access to the website reflects how American universities are grappling with regulating expression that is highly critical of Israel amid concerns it may veer into antisemitism. This, in turn, has led to complaints about censorship and academic freedom concerning Palestinian scholarship.
In a statement, the board of directors, consisting of faculty members and alumni, said it decided to suspend the website after learning that not all students on the Law Review had read the essay before its publication. The board had asked the editors to hold the article until June 7 to allow others time to review it, but the editors published it on Monday instead. The board then decided to take the website down temporarily “to provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed.”
In a letter to the editorial staff provided to The New York Times, the board described the handling of the article with unusual secrecy as “unacceptable.”
The involvement of the 12-member board, which includes prominent figures such as Gillian Lester, the law school dean, and Gillian Metzger, a constitutional law scholar at Columbia, was unusual. Typically, the board does not interfere in editorial decisions of the student-led organization.
“This is the first time ever that the board of directors of the Law Review has intervened in any way in the publication of an article,” said Katherine Franke, a Columbia law professor who supported the article’s publication. “It’s hard to believe that if the article had been about anything else, the board would have cared about the process,” she added.
The 105-page article by Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and doctoral candidate at Harvard, calls Zionism a form of colonialism and racism. Eghbariah argues for a new legal concept, “nakba”—the Arabic word for catastrophe used by Palestinians to describe their forced displacement in 1948.
Eghbariah called the website shutdown an attempt to silence his scholarship. “What is so scary about Palestinians speaking their truth?” he asked.
Editors admitted using an irregular process for editing the piece due to concerns about censorship. Among the roughly 100 people involved with the journal, they created a smaller committee to solicit and select the piece, which is not always the Review’s procedure. This committee defended their process, stating the article went through “at least six rounds of intensive editing and fact-checking over several months.”
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, numerous university faculty members across the country have been investigated, suspended, or fired for making statements perceived as antisemitic or supportive of the attack. Student protests have also faced widespread condemnation, even when protesters argue their anti-Zionist views do not equate to being against Jews.
A shorter version of Eghbariah’s article was fully edited at the Harvard Law Review but was pulled from publication at the last minute after an emergency vote by the entire editorial staff. The Nation later published that essay in full.
The board of directors expressed a desire to restore the website soon but requested that a note be appended to the article indicating it had not been subjected to the usual review process. The note would state that the article was solicited and edited by a limited number of student editors and was not made available for all student editors to review.
The board also noted concerns about the atmosphere at the Review, citing statements from some students about feeling excluded and unwelcome. The board expressed a hope to work with the editorial staff to address these issues moving forward.