I have never been a fan of law reviews or law review articles. Law reviews are the only form of ostensibly academic journalism of which I'm aware in which the editors and reviewers are not themselves accomplished scholars or researchers in their fields, but are students studying for a first degree in law. And the articles themselves are often written as masturbatory exercises for the author, rather than pieces that are meant to read by others.
Now, the students running the Columbia Law Review have given all of us a new reason to lack respect for that publication. Yesterday, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the same, uh, erudite student editors of the Columbia Law Review - the ones who a few weeks ago asked that exams be cancelled and all students given a passing grade because they were traumatized by the NYPD forcibly removing trespassers who'd occupied a university building - tried to pull a fast one with a law review article: over the course of months, a small group of editors clandestinely worked on an anti-Israel piece, keeping it hidden from the rest of the 100-member staff of the Review, in contrast to, and in contravention of, the Review's standard practice. Only two days before scheduled publication - which was supposed to be earlier this week - was its existence revealed to those people.
Upon learning of the forthcoming publication, the Board of Directors of the Review, which includes faculty members, asked the editors to delay publication. They refused.
So the Board took down the Law Review's website.
As of this moment, if you put in "https://columbialawreview.org", you get the message that "Website is under maintenance". See the screenshot below.
We'll see how long the site stays down. Given the the university's willingness earlier this week to turn its campus in a "separate-but-equal" facility vis-a-vis Jews, I expect the site will be back online in a few days and the article published, but who knows. At this point, I'm pleased that the adults in charged have to this point actually behaved liked adults.