The Columbia Law Review is back online after students threatened a work stoppage over censorship of an article by the first Palestinian legal scholar to publish in CLR. The board had proposed appending a disclaimer that would have undermined the article, Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept. The students rejected the board's proposal by a 20-5 vote.
The Intercept notes: "... 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."
Sohum Pal, a CLR articles editor, said, "Powerful legal scholarship cannot be silenced...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."
In a statement received after publication Eghbariah stated: "The fact that the Board could not cite any substantive deficiencies with the piece but rather resorted to allegations about internal processes, which were rejected by CLR editors, tells me all I need to know. This is not only a Palestine exception in action but also a disingenuous attempt to manufacture controversy that undermines and deflects attention from the content of the article."
The full article is back online here.
See related quicklink: Columbia Law Review Board Nukes Website Over Palestine Article.
