Law reviews are typically sleepy, student-edited journals that publish turgid scholarship. The articles may be read by specialists, and they are often read by no one beyond the author and editors. But Columbia University law school’s law review has received a rare burst of public attention this week.
According to various media outlets, the law review’s board of directors, composed of faculty and alumni, tried to censor an article critical of Israel. Except that’s not what happened at all. The true story involves a faction of the law review secretly breaking all procedural rules and customs to publish a piece of ideologically driven claptrap.
The claptrap in question is an article by graduate student Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” To say that the article is of poor quality not worthy of an elite law review like Columbia’s, considered one of the three or four most prestigious legal journals in the United States, would be an understatement. The article reads as if one asked ChatGPT to disguise a lengthy, biased, inaccurate propaganda piece as legitimate scholarship, making it a dull read and throwing in hundreds of footnotes to dubious sources.