Student editors at the Columbia Law Review allege they were pressured by the journal’s board of directors to halt the publication of an academic article by a Palestinian human rights lawyer accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza and maintaining an apartheid regime. When the editors refused and published the piece on Monday morning, the board, composed of faculty and alumni from Columbia University’s law school, shut down the law review’s website entirely. As of Tuesday evening, the site displayed a static homepage indicating it was “under maintenance.”
This incident at one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious legal journals highlights the ongoing debate over academic speech, which has deeply divided students, staff, and college administrators since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war.
Several Columbia Law Review editors described the board’s actions as an unprecedented breach of editorial independence. The board oversees the nonprofit’s finances but has traditionally not influenced the selection of articles.
In a letter sent to the student editors on Tuesday, the board of directors expressed concerns that the article, titled “Nakba as a Legal Concept,” had not undergone the usual review or selection processes. They claimed that many student editors were unaware of the article’s existence.
“To preserve the status quo and provide student editors some window of opportunity to review the piece, as well as provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed, we temporarily suspended the website,” the board wrote.
Those involved in editing the piece insisted they had followed a rigorous review process, although they admitted to limiting the number of students aware of the article to prevent potential backlash.
In his piece, Rabea Eghbariah, a Harvard doctoral candidate, accuses Israel of committing numerous “crimes against humanity” and argues for a new legal framework to address the “ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine.”
Eghbariah commented via text message that the website suspension should be viewed as “a microcosm of broader authoritarian repression occurring across U.S. campuses.”
Editors said they had voted overwhelmingly in December to commission a piece on Palestinian legal issues. They formed a smaller committee, open to all editorial leaders, which ultimately accepted Eghbariah’s article. An earlier version of this article had been submitted to the Harvard Law Review but was not published due to internal backlash, according to The Intercept.
Anticipating controversy, the committee handling the article did not upload it to a server accessible to the broader membership and some administrators of the law journal. The full staff of the Columbia Law Review only saw the piece on Sunday, a practice that editorial staffers said was not unusual.
“We’ve never circulated a particular article in advance,” said Sohum Pal, an articles editor. “So the idea that this is all over a process concern is a total lie. It’s very transparently content-based.”
In their letter, the board stated that all student editors should have been given the opportunity to read and discuss the article.
“Whatever your views of this piece, it will clearly be controversial and potentially have an impact on all associated with the Review,” they wrote.
Some students expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if the article was published. This anxiety was heightened by incidents like trucks circling Columbia and other campuses, labeling students as antisemites for their affiliations with groups seen as hostile to Israel.
The board suggested appending a statement to the article noting that it had not been subjected to a standard review process. However, many student editors opposed this idea, arguing that the standard process had been followed.
Despite the website’s shutdown, the student editors quickly uploaded Eghbariah’s article to a publicly accessible site, where it has since spread widely on social media.
“It’s really ironic that this piece probably got more attention than anything we normally publish,” said Erika Lopez, an editor who worked on the piece, “even after they nuked the website.”
The controversy at Columbia Law Review underscores the intense and ongoing debate over academic freedom and the expression of critical viewpoints in the context of the Israel-Hamas conflict.