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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 &