The Institute of Art & Law

We are very excited to welcome you to the book launch of The Parthenon Marbles Dispute: Heritage, Law, Politics by Alexander Herman on 28th September. The event, kindly hosted by the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) in London, will also serve as the launch for the new Art Law Library series that IAL is running […]

We are happy to announce that the next instalment of our popular Diploma in Law and Collections Management (DipLCM) course will run in London from 9 to 13 October 2023. The course is open to all those who work in collections management (or related fields) at museums, galleries, libraries or archives. This course will cover […]

What are the particular legal issues that face buyers, sellers and collectors of modern and contemporary art? Join us on 9th November at a seminar kindly hosted by Wedlake Bell LLP in London as we explore this topic in detail. Many of the relevant issues will be unique to dealing in such periods, especially insofar […]

This unique Masters in Law Programme (LLM) is offered in partnership between the Institute of Art and Law and the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) at Queen Mary University of London. The programme covers every major legal area affecting the art market and arts management and is ideal for practitioners in this field. The […]

Neither the US Constitution nor the US Copyright Act mandates ‘human authorship’ for copyright. Yet, the US Copyright Office (USCO) has come out strong in its requirement of the human element, denying registration to computer-generated work on that basis and even winning summary judgment in a federal case related to one such denial. Why then […]

It is a simple truth that idealistic organisations founded by charismatic individuals, or established in response to extraordinary circumstances, decline the further that time carries them from their Big Bang of fervour and faith. Such a decline is well underway, unfortunately, with the World Heritage Sites, probably the best-known part of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, […]

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, on the advice of Historic England, announced recently that the hulk of the nineteenth-century iron steamship, Lady Alice Kenlis, located at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk has been granted protection as a Scheduled Monument. The hulk (the term is used to describe an old ship which has been permanently […]

We also offer both digital-only and digital + hardcopy subscription options in partnership with Hein. Art Antiquity and Law is a Quarterly designed for all who value the cultural and historical environment. The principal aim of the Quarterly is to inform. It exists to tell those who work in the art and antiquity world about the law governing their […]

This second edition of Lyndel Prott’s Commentary on the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects provides not only an article-by-article analysis of the Convention, but also takes account of the many positive developments in the practices of museums and States regarding re-evaluation of the status of objects in collections and, in some cases, return of those objects to their countries of origin. The Convention’s influence can be seen in the text of the 2014 EU Directive on the return of cultural objects unlawfully removed from the territory of a Member State, which, in its introductory paragraphs, calls on Member States of the European Union to consider ratification of both the 1970 UNESCO Convention and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention.

More recently, in France, the 2018 Report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy on the restitution of African heritage described the Convention as “the only legal instrument with the potential to redress the imbalance [between European ‘holding’ States and claimant States]” the ratification of which would “confirm the sustainability of returns”.

ISBN: 978-1-903987-43-8, paperback

Publication date: 6 April 2021

Edited by Ruth Redmond-Cooper Published: January 2021. Hardback 338 Pages ++ Paperback ISBN I978-1-903987-41-4 Hardback ISBN I978-1-903987-42-1 This book was launched on 27 January 2021, see here. In January 2021, the Institute of Art and Law published the second edition of Norman Palmer’s classic work, Museums and the Holocaust. In the twenty years since the […]