Law Professors Sign Statement Condemning NYU Legal Journal’s Israel Boycott
“policies that are antithetical to the principles of open inquiry, academic freedom, and the free and unfettered intellectual exchange of ideas”
Our own Professor Jacobson is one of the signatories.
Algemeiner reports:
Law Professors Condemn NYU Legal Journal’s Israel Boycott, Warning of ‘Political Censorship’
A growing group of legal scholars from around the country have signed onto a statement expressing “deep concerns” about the recent endorsement by a New York University School of Law journal of the boycott movement against Israel.
In a Nov. 18 statement, the student-run N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change (RLSC) charged NYU of being “complicit” in “Israeli apartheid,” and announced it would make a “firm commitment to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.”
The journal said it would boycott “events, activities, agreements, or projects involving Israeli academic institutions or that otherwise promote the normalization of Israel in the global academy,” including activities “based on the false premise of symmetry/parity between the oppressors and the oppressed or that claim that both colonizers and colonized are equally responsible for the ‘conflict.’
The statement prompted a response from the university days later, saying it “rejects, as it has for many years, calls for academic boycotts of Israel, and the University likewise rejects calls to close its NYU Tel Aviv Program, to which it remains fully committed.”
A response published this week, now joined by 25 scholars, said the move “presents an unprecedented and dangerous development — a decision by the Board and Staff Directors of an academic law journal to apply political censorship to their activities.”
“As scholars who teach and train students who will enter the legal profession and the professoriate, we are disheartened and dismayed that the student-led RLSC has embraced and adopted policies that are antithetical to the principles of open inquiry, academic freedom, and the free and unfettered intellectual exchange of ideas,” the statement said.
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