NYU School of Law’s Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law is glad to be able to announce that on September 16, 2024, it will host a seminar titled “Restituting Nazi-Confiscated Art: A Restatement”.
The in-person only event, to take place from 6.30-8.00 pm in the Lester Pollack Colloquium Room, located at 245 Sullivan Street, NY, will feature Professor Matthias Weller as the main speaker and Professor Francesca Ragno, Professor Clayton P. Gillette, and Mr. Alfred Fass as commentators, while the Center’s Executive Director, Professor Franco Ferrari, the seminar’s convener, will act as moderator.
As you may know, in 1998, 44 States endorsed the “Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art”, 11 soft-law principles to encourage “just and fair solutions” for artworks and cultural property that had been taken from Jewish people in the Holocaust. These principles have set in motion a far-reaching process of restitution of artworks outside court proceedings producing thousands of decisions in the six most active countries: Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland – good reasons to distill from this practice a “Restatement of Restitution Rules for Nazi-Confiscated Art” in order to identify recurring issues, tipping points, and a “grammar of reasons” that will help to address recurring points of controversy. And it is this “Restatement”, elaborated by Professor Matthias Weller and his team of PhD researchers over the last five years, that Professor Weller will present on the occasion of the event hosted by the Center. In his presentation, Professor Weller will focus on the concept behind and the results of this research project, possible implications for international practice, as well as the context of his work in Germany, where the Government is currently undertaking a major reform of the restitution process, with implications also for arbitration.
Although participation in the event is free of charge, given the limited space, registration is required.
You can register using this link: https://forms.gle/EGGQa68YHdjfyYhp8
For more information, please see these short bios of the speaker, the commentators, and the moderator:
Matthias Weller, Mag.rer.publ., MAE, is the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Professor for Civil Law, Art and Cultural Property Law, a Director of the Institute for German and International Civil Procedural Law, and a Founding Member of the Center for Reconciliation Research. He studied law at the University of Heidelberg and, as a scholar of the German Scholarship Foundation, at the University of Cambridge,. He was the Joseph Story Fellow for Private International Law at the Harvard Law School in 1998/1999. He worked for an attorney at the Bar of the German Federal Court of Justice in 2008/2009 and contributed to almost 100 appeal cases in civil and commercial matters. He is, inter alia, a member of the German Arbitration Institution (DIS) and the Court of Arbitration for Art (CAfA), a subdivision of the Dutch Arbitration Institution. In 2024, next to completing the Restatement Project, he organized and delivered, commissioned by the German Government, the „International Study on Strengthening the German Advisory Commission“, i.e., the Commission that is currently hearing cases on the restitution of Nazi-looted Art in out-of-court mediatory proceedings. He is also acting as arbitrator, in particular in cross-border disputes.
Francesca Ragno is Full Professor of International Law at the Department of Political and Social Science of the University of Bologna and NYU Global Professor of International Arbitration (Paris Program). She graduated in Law (J.D.) with honors at the University of Bologna and obtained her PhD from the University of Verona. Throughout her career, she has done research and lectured in Italy and at many universities abroad, such as the University of Heidelberg, Paris Nanterre and the University of Pittsburgh (as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair). Her teaching and scholarship span public international law, EU law, international trade and business law, transnational litigation, conflict of laws, international commercial arbitration and art law. She is a qualified attorney in Italy.
Clayton P. Gillette is the Max E. Greenberg Professor of Contract Law at NYU School of Law, where he teaches in the areas of contracts, commercial sales, and local government law. He has also served as Vice Dean at NYU School of Law. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Gillette served as the Perre Bowen Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and as the Warren Scholar in Municipal Law and Associate Dean at Boston University. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, and Columbia Law School. Professor Gillette earned his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan and a B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College. Before entering academia, he clerked for Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and was associated with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton in New York City.
Alfred Fass, a businessman and historian, is the great-grandson of Nuremberg toy manufacturer Abraham Adelsberger (1863-1940), who owned an art collection of at least 1,000 objects. After his company Fischer & Co. ran into financial difficulties at the end of the 1920s, Adelsberger used parts of the collection as loan collateral with lenders such as Dresdner Bank. The Abraham Adelsberger Art Research Project of the Institute for Art History at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Lost Art Foundation, reconstructs the collection and also investigates the role of banks in monetizing the objects. While Abraham Adelsberger sold works of art at auction before 1933, the family lost the remainder of the collection due to Nazi persecution. In 1939, Abraham Adelsberger fled with his wife Clothilde to Amsterdam, where he died in 1940. Clothilde Adelsberger was deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1943 and survived the Holocaust.
Franco Ferrari is the Clarence D. Ashley Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law at NYU School of Law. Before joining NYU, he was a full professor of law at Tilburg University (in the Netherlands), the University of Bologna, and the University of Verona (in Italy). After serving as a member of the Italian delegation to various sessions of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) from 1995 to 2000, he was Legal Officer at the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, International Trade Law Branch, from 2000 to 2002, where he was responsible for numerous projects, including the preparation of the UNCITRAL Digest on applications of the UN Sales Convention. He has published more than 360 law review articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries in various languages and 50 books in the areas of international commercial law, conflict of laws, comparative law, and international commercial arbitration. Professor Ferrari, a recipient of the 2018 Certificate of Merit for High Technical Craftsmanship and Utility to Practicing Lawyers and Scholars awarded by the American Society of International Law, also acts as an international arbitrator both in international commercial arbitrations and investment arbitrations.