Law & Cultural Heriatge Course to be Offered at the School of Law

Last Spring, the University of Arkansas School of Law offered a collaborative course in Law & Cultural Heritage. We are pleased to report that this popular course will return this summer, and will once again include an option for field work in Rome. The course is facilitated by Don Judges, Associate Dean of Graduate & Experiential Learning, and is taught by visiting professors Stephen J. Cribari and Barbara Wold. 

Professor Cribari is a Visiting Professional Specialist at the University of Notre Dame Law School and former co-Director of Notre Dame Law School’s London Summer Programme. Professor Cribari is a true Renaissance Man. Published poet and playwright, expert in Art and Cultural Heritage, Evidence, and Criminal Law and procedure, he has taught in law schools across the United States, in London, for the Weisman Art Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, at the FBI training academy in Quantico, for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, for the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals, and for Marine JAG.


Professor Wold is an archaeologist, anthropologist, and lawyer. She has advised museums on Native American and international repatriation, taught courses in Law & Cultural Property and Museum Legal Issues at the University of Minnesota Law School and the University of Arkansas School of Law, and worked in University and Museum General Counsel offices in private practice concentrating on cultural and intellectual property law. Professor Wold has spoken at international assemblies on issues of cultural property, museum law, and intellectual property rights and regulations. When not in Fayetteville,  Professors Wold and Cribari are able to join the class by video conference.

 A description of the course is included below:

Art and antiquities inspire, intrigue, and delight.  And they cause legal problems. Collectors, museum curators, archaeologists, academics, politicians, legislators, military commanders, indigenous peoples, religious groups– all have interests in the rare and the beautiful.  Those interests may be artistic or scientific, economic or political, cultural or religious.  Art and antiquities are also commodities: they can be owned, loaned, sold, stolen, legally or illegally exported and imported.

We will consider these interests through questions such as whether the Elgin Marbles should be in the British Museum or Greece; the use of cultural property laws to take down or erect national cultural and political barriers; whether antiquities have artistic, religious, or only scientific, value; whether museums play a significant role in today’s world; whether museum directors and art conservers are bound by ethical constraints; whether the cultural heritage of First Peoples should be specially preserved.

In Rome, we will concentrate on the resolution of Holocaust-era claims regarding Nazi looting of art, illegal traffic in stolen antiquities, and the problems presented by cultural property during armed conflict. Law & Cultural Heritage Class includes required five days of classes (2 credits) and optional field work in Rome, Italy for one additional credit, May 16-22, 2015.