Law Schools

This Is The Actual Campus Censorship The Free Speech People Should Be Worried About

What happened to free speech?

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Censored pressHarvard Law consistently ranks as one of the best law schools in America. When Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights lawyer and Harvard Law alum penned an essay framing the Nakba as not just a historical event but a legal framework that makes sense of the contemporary Palestinian lived experience, it seemed like a perfect fit. At least until Harvard decided to pull the essay at the last minute.

But hey! Life doesn’t always go as planned — just find a different T14 willing to host your work. Eghbariah managed to not only garner the interest of Columbia’s Law Review, but got the essay published! For a couple of minutes or so before the Board went scorched earth to correct it having seen the light of day:

 

This is, as you could imagine, a rare break from the usually boring process of getting an article submitted. When asked to justify the departure, the Board of Directors had this to say to The Intercept:

The CLR board of directors told The Intercept in a statement that there were concerns about “deviation from the Review’s usual processes” and said it had taken the website down to give all CLR members the chance to read the article and that the decision was not a final decision on publication.

“We spoke to certain members of the student leadership to ask that they delay publication for a few days so that, at a minimum, the manuscript could be shared with all student editors, to provide them with a chance to read it and respond,” the board said. “Nevertheless, we learned this morning that the manuscript had been made public. In order to provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed, we have temporarily suspended its website.”

That sounds reasonable in a vacuum, but not everyone is buying it. Some of the doubters are Columbia Law staff:

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“I don’t suspect that they would have asserted this kind of control had the piece been about Tibet, Kashmir, Puerto Rico, or other contested political sites,” Katherine Franke, a professor, told The Intercept.

This is a (very prestigious!) small moment in a bold curtailing of campus free speech. No, I don’t mean Amy Wax complaining about not being able to bring White supremacists to campus again or Judge Kyle Duncan being forced to explain himself. When that happens we don’t see actual pushback — Penn pulls another finger wagging strategy from their hats and Wax gets more time on TV or Duncan gets to pretend he got martyred over a student-led cross examination.

When right leaning speakers wax poetic about the First Amendment and censorship, they get to tour FedSoc chapters playing victim over how against the grain their thoughts are for the mainstream and their allies start flexing their institutional influence by boycotting twenty-something students because, again, well established judges on SCOTUS short lists are the real victims.

Try as they might to censor Eghbariah’s work, this is the internet people. You can still read the work in its entirety:

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COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW REFUSED TO TAKE DOWN ARTICLE ON PALESTINE, SO ITS BOARD OF DIRECTORS NUKED THE WHOLE WEBSITE [The Intercept]

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.

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