CALIFORNIA SCHOLARS FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM
June 6, 2024
To: Professor Gillian Metzger, Columbia Law Review Board of Directors gmetzg1@law.columbia.edu
We write as members of California Scholars for Academic Freedom*. We want to express our deep concern over the treatment afforded to Rabea Eghbariah, who is an S.J.D. Candidate at Harvard Law School. Mr. Eghbariah’s academic freedom and free speech rights have now been violated by two law schools, both of which are in the top tier of legal studies institutions in the United States.
Rabea Eghbariah is a human rights lawyer practicing in the U.S., as well as an advanced doctoral student at the Harvard Law School. At the request of the Harvard Law Review editorial board, he submitted an article to the journal on the subject of the legal status of the Arabic term “Nakba,” which he argued should receive formal legal status in various courts as a signifier of the dispossession, expulsion, and civil/human rights of Palestinians in the period beginning in 1948 with establishment of the Israeli state. The article was accepted and edited for publication by the HLR, but then killed or “spiked” by the journal.
After news of this action reached them, law student editors at the Columbia Law Review reached out to Mr. Eghbariah, soliciting a similar article for publication in their journal, also a quite prestigious one. This second article was again accepted, edited, and prepared for publication. It appeared as an advance publication on the CLR website. Once more, however, the article was spiked, this time by the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors, which is composed of faculty and alumni who supervise the journal’s student editors. In this case, because Mr. Eghbariah’s article was already in print virtually on the CLR’s website, the board of directors not only suppressed its publication, but also closed the CLR Journal’s entire website, so as to prevent the article’s appearance on the Web. All this occurred after many months of discussion and editorial preparations on the part of Mr. Eghbariah and the CLR editors. The article, about a hundred pages in length, was thus suppressed for a second time. “The attempts to silence legal scholarship on the Nakba by subjecting it to an unusual and discriminatory process are not only reflective of a pervasive and alarming Palestine exception to academic freedom,” Mr. Eghbariah told The Intercept, “but are also a testament to a deplorable culture of Nakba denialism.”
An intervention of this type in the editorial procedures of a law journal is quite unprecedented, especially in a top-ranked publication. Publication at the CLR had been unanimously approved by the editors. The act of stifling Mr. Eghbariah’s article therefore violated not only standards of academic freedom in respect to the author, but also infringed upon those standards and freedoms in respect to the editorial board. Repudiating the editors’ judgment and discarding their many months of work, along with those of the author, fundamentally contradicts Columbia Law School’s commitment to legal scholarship as well as academic freedom. Suspending the CLR’s website further extends the board of director’s contempt for these principles, since it effectively shuts down the journal’s ability to publish anything at all online, whether on this topic or any other. Finally, the CLR’s repressive actions in respect to Mr. Eghbariah’s work mirror and extend those of the HLR to suppress his ideas and research, demonstrating an egregious contempt that extends beyond one publication to the field of legal scholarship as a whole.
California Scholars for Academic Freedom condemns these anti-democratic and repressive actions. Last night, when students threatened to stop work on the journal the board reinstated the website. The article is once again available online at https://columbialawreview.org/content/toward-nakba-as-a-legal-concept/.
We demand the immediate publication of Mr. Eghbariah’s article on the Nakba in the print journal and that an apology be issued to Mr. Eghbariah on the part of the CLR board of directors.
Sincerely,
Hatem Bazian,
Lecturer UC Berkeley
Editor-in-chief, Islamophobia Studies Journal
Margaret Ferguson Distinguished Professor of English, University of California at Davis; Tenured professor of English at Columbia from 1986 to 1990 and again from 1997- 1999
Nancy Gallagher
Professor Emerita of History
University of California, Santa Barbara
Sang Hea Kil,
Professor
Justice Studies Department
San José State University
Dennis Kortheuer
Lecturer Emeritus, Dept of History
California State University, Long Beach
Shahla Razavi
Associate Professor of Mathematics/Retired
Mt. San Jacinto Community College
Dan Segal
Professor of Anthropology and History
Pitzer College
Susan Slyomovics
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, UCLA
Barnard ‘71
Howard Winant
Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus
University of California, Santa Barbara
* CALIFORNIA SCHOLARS FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM (cs4af) is a group of over 200 scholars who defend academic freedom, the right of shared governance, and the First Amendment rights of faculty and students in the academy and beyond. California Scholars for Academic Freedom investigates legislative and administrative infringements on freedom of speech and assembly, and it raises the consciousness of politicians, university regents and administrators, faculty, students and the public at large through open letters, press releases, petitions, statements, and articles. Our vigilance extends to violations of academic freedom anywhere in the United States and abroad, for we recognize that violations of academic freedom anywhere are threats to academic freedom everywhere.
CALIFORNIA SCHOLARS FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM 