Dr Tatiana Flessas

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law and LLB in Laws. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

Cultural Property and Heritage Law is an expanding area of legal practice, scholarship and policy-making. It addresses the question 'who owns the past', by looking at ownership and regulatory claims to ancient objects, traditional cultural practices, and historic locations. The protection and management of heritage sites, antiquities, artefacts, and public and private museums give rise to increasing amounts of domestic and international legislation and regulation. This area of law is especially important to peoples attempting to claim (or reconstruct) their identity after war, colonialism, or other forms of culture loss; and to people or organizations that stand to make serious profits from memorial or historical goods and experiences. We also look at some very timely heritage disputes: is Russia taking cultural property out of Ukraine? Should statues of slaveowners still be in public places? Can anyone tell the story of a particular group, or is it 'cultural appropriation' to do so?

The second half of the course, 'Art Law', is the body of law, involving numerous disciplines, that protects, regulates and facilitates the creation, use and marketing of art. Art law relies in part on a specialised jurisprudence drawn from intellectual property law, and specific warranties as to title and authenticity provided by auction houses and art dealers. However, no one jurisprudence applies to all legal matters vital to artists, purchasers, sellers, museums, dealers and others involved in the art world. Rather, practitioners and academics in this field draw on property and trusts law, some criminal and tort law (for example, as applied to street art or fakes and forgeries), and statutes, import/export controls, treaties and other forms of regulation (for example in determining whether an artwork is a 'national treasure' and should be denied an export licence).

In this course, we will take both a practical and a scholarly and interpretive approach to the issues. We will explore the important ethical and legal aspects in the creation, sale, collection and display of antiquities and art. We will be looking at international Conventions as well as domestic legislation and common-law approaches that attempt to define 'property', 'culture' and 'theft'. We will also look at the major institutions in the field, such as UNESCO and ICOM. We will discuss issues such as authenticity, attribution, restoration, money laundering, and stolen art. We will consider the recent developments in addressing the restitution of art taken during the Nazi era. Finally, we will consider what, if any, obligations owners have to 'their' art. The course will welcome guest speakers and include the opportunity to speak with practitioners and experts from outside the LSE.

20 hours of seminars in the WT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay and 1 case study in the AT.

Formative assessment in either case study or essay form

• Blake, J. (2000). On Defining the Cultural Heritage. International & Comparative Law Quarterly,49(1), 61-85.
• Keane, D. (2004).  The Failure to Protect Cultural Property in Wartime, DePaul J. Art, Tech. & Intell. Prop. L 14, 1-38.
• O’Donnell, T. (2011).   ‘The Restitution of Holocaust Looted Art and Transitional Justice: The Perfect Storm or the Raft of Medusa?’ 22 European Journal of International Law, 49 – 80.
• Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meaning of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Patty Gerstenblith, 'Getting Real: Cultural, Aesthetic and Legal Perspectives on the Meaning of Authenticity of Art Works', Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts 35 (2012), pp. 321–356.
• Bolton, L. (2015).  AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF REPATRIATION: Engagements with Erromango, Vanuatu.  The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Transformations, First Edition. Edited by Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips.
• Walter Benjamin, (1935) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt,
• translated by Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay (Schocken Books, 1969)
• Amy Adler, A. (2018). Why Art Does Not Need Copyright, 86(2), The George Washington Law Review, 313-374.
• Colin Renfrew, Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership:  The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology (Duckworth, 2000).
• Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin and Lydell V Prott, eds. Cultural Property and Contested Ownership: The trafficking of artefacts and the quest for restitution (Routledge, 2016).
• J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage:  The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (John Wiley & Sons, 1995).

Selected Cases

• Drake v Thos Agnew & Sons Ltd [2002] EWHC 294 (QB)
• Govt of Iran v Barakat Galleries Ltd (CA) [2007] EWCA Civ 1374
• The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi (2016) ICC-01/12-01/15
• Jeddi v Sotheby’s & Ors [2018] EWHC 1491 (Comm)

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.