On 11/12, we wrote to the board of editors of the Harvard Law Review to express our concern about their decision not to publish an HLR Online essay solicited from Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School.
Mr. Eghbariah’s essay, titled “The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine,” was solicited for publication on the HLR blog, passed through several rounds of edits, and was then rejected at the last moment by an unprecedented decision of HLR’s editorial board. As an HLR online editor explained in a letter to Eghbariah, the article was rejected not due to substantive or technical issues, but because of concerns that some editors “might oppose or be offended by the piece” and that it would “provoke a reaction from members of the public” that may harm the editors (as quoted by The Nation). No meaningful explanation was provided by the board for its decision to reject Eghbariah’s article.
