Behind the Scenes: ‘Columbia Law Review’ Symposium Explores the Law of Protest

When Shaunak Puri ’25 (above) became Columbia Law Review’s symposium and book review editor in January 2024, he had the opportunity to choose which aspect of the job he would focus on. He decided to organize a symposium—which would consume him and his time for the next 10 months.

Working with a small team of other Law Review editors, Puri oversaw a multiphasic process to evaluate and select a topic, solicit pieces, recruit speakers, and organize logistics. Their hard work—Puri estimates he spent at least 30 hours a week on the symposium—resulted in a daylong event on November 15 that featured two keynote speakers and four panels inspired by five pieces the symposium committee commissioned. The pieces will be published in the forthcoming Volume 125, Issue 5 of the Law Review. 

“One of the wonderful things about Columbia Law School is that students have the opportunity to put on a major symposium,” says Puri. “I had thought that a lot of legal scholarship was shouting into a void and hoping someone will listen, but working on this project, I could see how a law review’s work can be useful in coming up with new ways of thinking about issues.” Other student-run journals hosted symposia in 2024, including the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review’s “Judging Science” and the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law’s “Food and Water in a Warming World: Agriculture, Climate Change, and Environmental Law.”   

In Search of Symposium Topics

In February 2024, the Law Review symposium committee put out a call to legal academics for three-page symposium proposals. By early March, they had received 36 proposals from scholars across the country on topics—including artificial intelligence, federal courts, the Second Amendment, and the law of protest. “We evaluated their timeliness, novelty, robustness, and flexibility,” he says.

Puri next consulted with fellow editors to consider whether the potential topics reflected the journal’s overall vision. “We considered whether the topics would bring in new voices and provide an opportunity to have practitioners in dialogue with academics. We wanted the topic to be interdisciplinary and inject something new into the academic world,” he says. 

By April, there were three finalists. Puri presented each concept, and “The Law of Protest” was selected.

The proposal had come from Rachel Moran, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, and Puri emailed her to let her know that they had chosen hers. “We told her we hoped she would submit an abstract of a piece for consideration,” he says, adding he could not promise that they would publish a piece by her even though they had chosen her topic, since all abstracts would go through a rigorous selection process. (In the end, her piece, “Overbroad Protest Laws,” was selected, and she participated in the symposium along with some of the potential panelists she had suggested in her proposal.)

The symposium’s topic was especially timely, given the demonstrations on U.S. college campuses, including Columbia University. Puri was mindful that the event address a broad range of legal issues regarding protests under American law, past, present, and future. 

Cultivating Papers, Curating Panels

In April, the Law Review put out a call for two-page proposals for pieces on the chosen topic. The editors received 85 abstracts that Puri and a team of six readers winnowed down to five. “Our criteria were relevance, quality of writing, their publishing history, and whether they could handle the rigor of our editorial process,” he says. The team asked Columbia Law faculty—Jeremy Kessler, Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law; Richard Briffault, Joseph P. Chamberlain Professor of Legislation; David Pozen, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law; and Kendall Thomas, Nash Professor of Law—to weigh in on some of the abstracts “to see if the ideas had legs or if there were any potential problems with them,” says Puri. 

Commissioning papers for the symposium was a unique opportunity for student editors to work with scholars as they developed, researched, and wrote their pieces as opposed to the Law Review’s usual editorial process in which submissions are finished articles. “With the symposium papers, there’s a lot of relationship building with the authors, setting out our expectations in the publication contract, and letting them know we reserve the right not to publish if their piece is not up to snuff,” says Puri.

By the end of summer 2024, when all the symposium pieces were in process, Puri and his 10-member symposium committee began conceiving themes for the panels, seeking out nearly two dozen scholars and practitioners to participate, and arranging the logistics of bringing them to campus. For panel moderators, Puri turned to Columbia Law faculty: Kessler; Amber Baylor, clinical professor of law; Bernard E. Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law; and Elora Mukherjee, Jerome L. Greene Clinical Professor of Law. “We wanted to ensure scholars from the Law School were integrated throughout the event,” he says. (Read more about the four panels below.)

A Day of Dialogue

When the symposium commenced on November 15, more than 200 people had registered to attend, and Puri had arranged for two keynote speakers to bookend the four panels. To encourage robust conversations, “The Law of Protest” organizers provided attendees with drafts of the five pieces beforehand. The panels not only offered dynamic conversations and Q&As for an audience of students and academics, but also provided valuable feedback for the authors, whose pieces were still in the process of being edited. 

The symposium opened with the second Karl Llewellyn Lecture by Justin Hansford, a professor at Howard University School of Law, who discussed the intersection of critical race theory and protest law, and his experiences as a legal observer of protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The closing address was delivered by Derecka Purnell, a former scholar in residence at Columbia Law School and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom; she explored the similarities and differences between being a movement lawyer and an activist, with the overarching question of what it means to work inside or outside a system.

One of the highlights for Puri was recruiting Law Review staff editor Kevin McCarthy ’26, who was incarcerated for 22 years, including more than nine in solitary confinement, to participate on the panel about protest spaces. “I had really wanted to have a student voice,” says Puri. McCarthy is working to break the barrier between being formerly incarcerated and working as an attorney in Big Law. “I was very happy because we achieved our goal of having a symposium with scholars, practitioners, and students all in dialogue with each other,” says Puri.

Organizing the symposium gave Puri a new appreciation for legal scholarship. “Part of the reason I became so passionate about the project is that I saw how a symposium can bring people together to talk and how scholarship can be collaborative and purposeful,” he says. “I am deeply proud of what we were able to accomplish.”