In November 2023, the Harvard Law Review solicited, edited, fact-checked, and then declined to publish Rabea Eghbariah's piece titled The Ongoing Nakba: Toward a Legal Framework for Palestine. The piece was ultimately published by The Nation and republished by Jadaliyya and the NYU Review of Law and Social Change, among others.
On June 3, 2024, the Columbia Law Review Board of Directors took down the entire CLR website after it had published a 105-page solicited article by Eghbariah titled Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.
To speak about silencing Palestinian scholarship and Nakba erasure, watch Rabea Eghbariah's Democracy Now! interview: “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept: Meet the Palestinian Lawyer Censored by Columbia and Harvard.”
On June 6, after CLR editors threatened to strike, the Board of Directors reinstated the website and republished the article. CLR editors have nonetheless voted to strike, demanding the removal of a statement by the Board pertaining to Eghbariah's article and total editorial independence of the review.
To learn more about the weaponization of process allegations by the Harvard Law Review and CLR Board of Directors, read this opinion piece by CLR editor Erika Lopez and HLR editor Tascha Shahriari-Parse: "We watched Ivy League law reviews censor Palestinian scholars first-hand."
Rabea Eghbariah is a human rights lawyer, doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School, and a member of Jadaliyya's Palestine page editorial team. To learn more about Eghbariah's work, read his interview with the Guardian: "Why are America’s elite universities so afraid of this scholar’s paper?". The full article Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept is available here.