There is no serious debate about whether Israel is a colonization project that practices apartheid and is currently committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Nor is there any question that the United States guarantees Israel’s existence and underwrites Israeli militarism with vast quantities of weapons, diplomatic support, and occasional direct military intervention.
If there were one institution in American life that one might expect to speak out against Israel, it would be the legal academy. After all, it is the business of law professors to speak about justice. And the point of academic tenure and freedom is to enable professors to speak when others might be afraid to do so.
But there has instead been silence. And in that silence has hung the question: “if law professors aren’t able to identify and oppose a colonization project that is underwritten by their nation and which is currently carrying out an open and notorious genocide, can they claim authority to speak about injustice of any kind in any place?”
The legitimacy of the profession of American law teaching and scholarship is at stake.
Unfortunately, the record of American law professors on the colonization and genocide of Palestine has been abysmal. The only group of law professors that has publicly referred to Israel’s extermination of Palestinians in Gaza as “genocide” is TWAIL, which in April 2025 called for the UN to expel Israel and in 2023 published a petition warning that Israel was embarking on a genocide. But few of the signatories are appointed at American law schools.
In 2023, there was also a lame call for a “ceasefire” issued by progressive American law scholars. But they were too timid publicly to release their own names and the petition made no mention of the colonization of Palestine, apartheid, or genocide.
Even as, in spring 2024, students around the country, including law students, rose up to express opposition to an American-backed genocide and underwent arrest, investigation, and discipline, law professors remained silent.
The Law and Political Economy Blog, which had once self-consciously styled itself as the voice a left vanguard in legal academia, managed to muster no more than a statement calling for “institutional fairness” that made no mention of genocide or colonization. (Even that commitment to institutional fairness was later called into question. When Yale later fired a Law and Political Economy Project employee for speaking out about Palestine, her colleagues failed directly to criticize Yale for its actions.)
In spring 2024, I asked the Law and Political Economy Blog to publish a post on my ongoing research into law and economic arguments against the existence of Israel. The blog declined based on the absurd pretext that a post employing law and economic methodology wasn’t suitable for a blog on law and political economy.
So it was not just the case that law professors were failing to speak out about the colonization and genocide of Palestine. Even the most progressive were actively suppressing the voices of law professors who wished to do so.
In this way, the website of the Antizionist Legal Studies Movement was born. It aims to save the American legal academy from the professional and moral bankruptcy that it has brought upon itself by failing to call out an open and notorious genocide and colonization project backed by the United States. It aims to create a space for law scholars to make clear their opposition to colonization, apartheid, and genocide and to study ways to bring Israel to an end in a fashion that does justice to its victims.
I had hoped that the Antizionist Legal Studies Movement would awaken the legal academy to the jeopardy of authority into which it had fallen by its silence. Instead, the debut of the website reinforced the impression that the academy’s fault is not one of omission but rather commission.
Not long after I posted notice of the website to the Civil Rights, International Law, Women in Legal Education, and Critical Theory online discussion groups of the Association of American Law Schools, the University of Kentucky, where I am appointed as a full professor of law with tenure, notified me that law professors in those discussion groups had complained about my posts and that the university was opening an investigation into whether the posts violated civil rights rules.
The legal academy was not just failing to speak up about genocide and colonization committed with American backing but was working actively to suppress efforts to do so by one of its own. Since the initiation of the investigation, public opposition by law professors or other law schools to this attempt to suppress speech against Israel has been almost nonexistent.
I call upon you to act.
1. Speak Out
I call upon law professors to speak out. The failure of the legal academy to take a stand against the ongoing American-backed colonization, apartheid, and genocide of Palestine undermines the professional and moral authority of the legal academy and makes it impossible for law professors to carry out their mission in any field of law.
a. Against Israel
First, and most importantly, you must speak out against the colonization, apartheid and genocide of Palestine. One way law professors can do that is to sign the petition of American law professors for international war against Israel. You can also show your support for ending Israel and liberating Palestine by displaying the Antizionist Safe Space flag. Or you can tick the box indicating support for war to end Israel when signing the Petition for my reinstatement (more about that petition below).
b. Against Rosenberg College of Law’s Assault on Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and Tenure
I also call upon you to speak out about the attempt of our law professor colleagues and an American law school—the J. David Rosenberg College of Law at the University of Kentucky—to punish speech in opposition to the existence of a colonization project that practices apartheid and is committing genocide.
You can do that by signing the Petition for my reinstatement. You can ask to embargo public release of your name until a threshold level of participation in the petition is met. If you want to write your own petition, feel free to send it to me and I can host it on this website and help you to disseminate it. (If you are neither a scholar nor a member of the University of Kentucky community, please sign this version of the petition instead.)
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has circulated a petition opposing the university’s action on free speech grounds. You are encouraged to sign that petition as well. It is available to all. The petition can be found here.
2. Replatform
Speaking up via petition is important, but there’s actually a more powerful way to save our profession from moral bankruptcy and defend free speech at the same time. That is to respond to an attempt to de-platform me—and by extension, Antizionist Legal Studies—by replatforming.
a. Invite me to speak
Are you interested in learning more about why Israel has no right to exist and why military intervention is needed to bring Israel to an end? Invite me to speak to your faculty, at your seminar, or to your student group, whether in person or online. Disagree with my position? Invite me to debate you or to answer your questions. The First Amendment protects your right to listen as well as my right to speak. So, respond to an attempt to infringe my First Amendment rights by asserting your own First Amendment rights with respect to the same speech. And because you will be listening and not speaking, you don’t have to agree with my speech in order to do that.
b. Forward my CV to your hiring committee
Inviting me to speak is not the only way to replatform. Angry at the J. David Rosenberg College of Law for trying to suppress the speech of a tenured faculty member? Forward my CV to your hiring committee. Law schools and law faculties can make a powerful statement of opposition to what University of Kentucky is doing by inviting me for a job interview.
3. Tell AALS Leadership to Take a Stand
I would also urge you to write to AALS leadership to urge it to take a stand against the attempt of a AALS member law school to suppress speech by a tenured law professor in opposition to the colonization, apartheid, and genocide of Palestine. In spring 2025, these leaders issued a public statement opposing the federal government’s assault on higher education and urging institutions not to be intimidated. Now, the University of Kentucky has hired an author of Project 2025 to investigate the speech of a tenured law professor. This is an opportunity for AALS leadership to demonstrate the courage it recently called upon others to show.
4. Keep Talking
Finally, you can help just by talking online, in person, in public or in private about Palestine, the legal academy’s disgraceful silence, and our colleagues’ attempt to suppress dissent such as my own. Copy me on what you write. I’d love to know what you are saying and to help amplify your voice.
Let’s save the American legal academy. Let’s stand in opposition to American-backed colonization, apartheid, and genocide.
Have a suggestion of how to respond to Zionist repression not mentioned above? Email me at ramsi@ramsiwoodcock.net .