The Exceptions Aren't Exceptional, They're Just Bad

A few days ago, an academic journal run out of the University of Minnesota apologized after informing a would-be contributor from Israel that it was refusing to consider submissions from scholars affiliated with Israeli universities.

Today, the Columbia Law Review website is down, reportedly due to the publication of an article by a Palestinian legal scholar on the "Nakba" that occurred in the wake of and as part of Israel's war of independence and its establishment as an independent state. We're still getting details, but the word is that the law review's board of directors (comprised of faculty and alumni) sought to overrule student editors who wished to publish the piece and, failing to do so, took down the website.

I've really found valuable and thoughtful Paul Horwitz's comments on cases like this, and so too here. In particular, I agree with him that it's not right to refer to the Columbia incident as part of a Palestine "exception" to free speech or academic freedom, not because it isn't a breach of academic freedom norms (it certainly seems to be), but because it isn't especially exceptional -- whether we're focused narrowly on Israel and Palestine (as the Minnesota case, above, illustrates) or more broadly on "controversial" topics and issue areas.

I am certainly disturbed by the action of the CLR leadership in simply eliminating the entire article, along with the website, even if it is eventually published. The notion that there is a unique "Palestinian exception" to free speech norms or academic freedom is absurd, in light of numerous other occasions on which writers, editors, publishers, and others have engaged in censorship and self-censorship on numerous hot-button subjects over the years. But I am hardly comforted by the possibility that it is one more exception. And it would be no more comforting if the exception were better seen as a general "controversial subject" exception.

It is quite clear that speech that is harshly critical of Israel quite regularly faces sanction and obstruction that does not comport with free speech or academic freedom norms. But that's not an exception, that's an instantiation of a larger part that free speech and academic freedom norms have many fair-weather friends and so find themselves under serious pressure on the regular. This isn't to say that they don't do important work -- they do, and a lot of speech that probably would be suppressed ends up being permitted because these free speech principles do carry a lot of weight. But the notion that they are impenetrable juggernauts who only rarely and idiosyncratically find themselves challenged is just not true. One reason I try to defend these norms so vigorously is precisely because I recognize that their fragility is the norm, not the exception.

In general, I think I have a more positive outlook towards student-edited law journals than Paul does, and so generally take a dim view of any sort of faculty or administrative meddling in journal affairs (the notion that a faculty or alumni-comprised committee has any role beyond, perhaps, the most soft-touch advisory capacity, in determining what articles the Columbia Law Review does or doesn't publish is absurd to me). So it should come as no surprise that I also strongly agree with Paul that even if there were reasons to think that the student editors acted in a fashion that departed from their own normal rules or processes in accepting this article (which may or may not be true), any interventions that hypothetically might have been justified cannot take the form of an ad hoc, last minute decision to pull the piece from publication altogether.

Indeed, assuming that this article is slated to be part of CLR's print volume, I'm not sure what the board of director's end game is here -- are they going to pulp the entire issue? Even if the article is bad, wrong-headed, offensive (and I haven't read it, so it may be none or all of these things), I see no reason why any of those (for better or worse not especially exceptional) sins cannot be addressed via the normal mechanisms of academic inquiry and response. Prior restraint is not the right move. And if the Columbia board did what it is alleged to have done here, it is shameful and outrageous -- no less so if it is not "exceptional".

UPDATE: The Columbia Law Review board has issued a statement explaining why it took down the website. On my read, nothing they say justifies the decision. The only thing that's potentially eyebrow-raising is the claim that the piece was not selected via the normal article-selection process. But this probably (though not certainly) has less than meets the eye: it is hardly unheard of for a law review to solicit a piece outside the normal article-selection channels, which easily could be (but really shouldn't be) called a departure from the "usual processes of review or selection." For example, when I was a law review editor most pieces went through the articles committee (which I was on), but our book review editor had essentially carte blanche authority to solicit book reviews on his or her own initiative. While there might be some valid basis for complaint if this article was unusually sequestered from (actual, extant) norms and practices of how articles move through the CLR process, such problems do not to my mind justify the extraordinary remedy of taking down the website. The short version is that even if (and this not clear) there are valid process-based objections to what (some members) of the Columbia Law Review did here, that does not mean that taking down the website is an appropriate remedy. As Alexandra Lahav wrote in a thoughtful thread, sometimes events transpire such that there just isn't a way to "preserve the status quo ex ante."

One thing that hasn't been mentioned but which I think may be lurking in the background here is the recently announced boycott of Columbia University graduates by a suite of right-wing judges who've made very clear their intention to inflict collective punishment on the Columbia community for (real or perceived) bad behavior by particular actors. Threats like this understandably could make members of the Columbia Law Review who were not part of (and were not given the opportunity to be part of) the publication decision especially sensitive -- they have reasonable basis to fear they will be held responsible and retaliated against for choices they did not make and might not have even been aware of. I'm sympathetic to those students, but ultimately, the people who have put them in that position are the judges and other actors who have decided to endorse indiscriminate academic blackballing as a political tactic. As much as these students are being put in an unfair position -- and they are -- the board should not have cowered in the face of this blackmail. The principles of academic freedom are too important to be allowed to yield even in the face of a credible threat of external retaliation -- this is true when the boycotters are right-wingers furious about pro-Palestinian advocacy, and it's true when the boycotters are left-wingers livid about Israeli inclusion.