Columbia Law Review

History

The Columbia Law Review represents the school's third attempt at a student-run law periodical. In 1885, the Columbia Jurist was founded by a group of six students but ceased publication in 1887. Despite its short run, the Jurist is credited with partially inspiring the creation of the Harvard Law Review, which began publication a short time later.

The second journal, the Columbia Law Times was founded in 1887 and closed down in 1893 due to lack of revenue.

Publication of the current Columbia Law Review began in 1901, making it the fifth oldest surviving law review in the US. Dean William Keener took an active involvement during its founding to help ensure its longevity.

Nakba article

Main article: Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept

In June 2024, the journal published an article by Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian human rights lawyer, titled "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept", which criticizes the "brutally sophisticated regime of oppression" of Palestinians "[a]cross Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and refugee camps" by the Israeli government. The article aims at creating an international legal framework for the Nakba similar to genocide and apartheid. The article also refers to the Arabic term "al-Nakba," which "is often used ... to refer to the ruinous establishment of Israel in Palestine."

The same day that the article was published, the Review's board of directors shut down the Review's website and replaced it with a message stating that the site was "under maintenance". Later that day, the Review's student editors published the article on a publicly accessible web site, as a free PDF file. Two days after the website was shut down, the editors voted to go on strike. The next day, the board of directors restored the Review's website, including Eghbariah's article, but added a statement explaining that the website was shut-down due to the "secretive" nature of the editorial process. The editorial board disagreed with that assertion and stated that the editorial process was comparable to that used for all other articles.

Impact

Among United States law journals as of 2025*, Columbia Law Review* is ranked #1 by Washington and Lee University Law School and as of 2023, #4 by a professor at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.

The Columbia Law Review was the top-cited law journal during the 2018 Supreme Court term.

According to the Journal Citation Reports the Columbia Law Review had a 2009 impact factor of 3.610, ranking it third out of 116 journals in the category "Law". In 2007, the Columbia Law Review ranked second for submissions and citations within the legal academic community, after Harvard Law Review.

Notable alumni

Notable alumni of the Columbia Law Review include:

• U.S. Supreme Court Justices
  • William O. Douglas
  • Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• U.S. Courts of Appeals Judges
  • Wilfred Feinberg
  • Harold Leventhal
  • Paul R. Hays
  • Harold Medina
  • Jerre Stockton Williams
  • James Alger Fee
  • Daniel M. Friedman
  • Joseph Frank Bianco
  • Barbara Lagoa
• U.S. District Courts Judges
  • Jack Weinstein
  • Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum
  • Denise Cote
  • Alvin Hellerstein
  • William Bernard Herlands
  • John S. Martin Jr.
  • Edmund Louis Palmieri
  • Alexander Holtzoff
  • Dickinson Richards Debevoise
  • Richard F. Boulware
  • James Edward Doyle
  • Margaret Garnett
• U.S. Solicitors General
  • Charles Fried
  • Donald Verrilli Jr.
• Chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission Mary Jo White
• Director of the CIA William Colby
• U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara
• Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Director of the National Economic Council Stephen Friedman (PFIAB)
• Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger
• Columbia Law School deans
  • Young B. Smith
  • Michael I. Sovern
  • Barbara Aronstein Black
• Columbia Law School professors
  • Herbert Wechsler
  • Oscar Schachter
  • Walter Gellhorn
  • Harvey Goldschmid
  • R. Kent Greenawalt
  • Gillian E. Metzger
  • E. Allan Farnsworth
• University of Pennsylvania Law School professors
  • Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
  • Howard Lesnick (Editor-in-Chief)
  • Amy Wax
• Yale Law School professors
  • Felix S. Cohen
  • Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
• Duke University School of Law professor George C. Christie
• Michigan Law School professor Mark D. West
• New York University Law School professor Samuel Estreicher
• Berkeley professor and criminal law scholar Sanford Kadish
• New York Governor George Pataki
• Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax
• Two-time SEC General Counsel David M. Becker
• NBA Commissioner David Stern
• New York Supreme Court Justice Aron Steuer
• Prominent attorneys
  • George Davidson
  • Arthur Garfield Hays
  • Gary P. Naftalis
  • Charles Rembar
  • Louis S. Weiss
• Authors
  • Brad Meltzer

Selected articles

References

References

1. "Columbia Law Review Contact/".
2. "Columbia Law Review on JSTOR".
3. (1901). "Front Matter". Columbia Law Review.
4. (1985). "The Historical Origins, Founding, and Early Development of Student-Edited Law Reviews". Hastings Law Journal.
5. (1918). "The Centennial History of the Harvard Law School, 1817–1917". Harvard law school association.
6. "About the Review".
7. Eghbariah, Rabea. (May 2024). "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept". Columbia Law Review.
8. (2024-06-03). "Columbia Law Review Refused to Take Down Article on Palestine, So Its Board of Directors Nuked the Whole Website".
9. Eghbariah, Rabea. (May 2024). "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept". Columbia Law Review.
10. Article was posted at https://static.al2.in/toward-nakba-as-a-legal-concept.pdf
11. Board's statement is at https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/STATEMENT-FROM-THE-CLR-BOARD-OF-DIRECTORS.pdf
12. (June 4, 2024). "Columbia Law Review Website Is Taken Offline Over Article Criticizing Israel". The New York Times.
13. "Columbia Law Review student editors to strike after directors intervene with article on Nakba" Ayaan Ali June 6, 2024 ''Columbia Spectator'' https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/06/07/columbia-law-review-student-editors-to-strike-after-directors-intervene-with-article-on-nakba/
14. (July 15, 2024). "2023 W&L Law Journal Rankings".
15. Newell, Bryce Clayton. (July 25, 2023). "Law Journal Meta-Ranking, 2023 Edition".
16. (2019-07-24). "Empirical SCOTUS: What the justices cited in OT 2018".
17. (2011). "Web of Science".
18. "Law Journals: Submissions and Ranking".