When L. Eden Burgess, LAW JD ’00, started practicing law, she never expected to be involved in art theft and restitution cases, let alone one dating back to the Holocaust-era that would make legal history.
Ms. Burgess, an associate at Andrews Kurth LLP in Washington, D.C., originally focused on environmental issues and patent litigation, but progressed into larger intellectual property cases. She wasn’t exposed to art theft and restitution law until she teamed up with Tom Kline, a trailblazer in this area who’s handled these types of cases for more than 20 years. (Mr. Kline also teaches in GW’s Museum Studies department.)
One of the most interesting cases the two took on – which ultimately changed the course of art restitution law – was representing the estate of Max Stern, an art dealer who was forced by the Nazis in the 1930s to sell more than 200 works of art, well below their value.
“The estate’s stated mission is to try to gather up all the objects that the art gallery in Dusseldorf was ordered to sell,” Ms. Burgess says.
Decades after Dr. Stern’s passing, the Canadian-based estate learned that a German baroness living in Rhode Island was in possession of one of his pieces, Girl from the Sabiner Mountains by Franz Xaver Winterhalter; it was discovered that the baroness’s stepfather had purchased the work at the auction in 1937.
According to Ms. Burgess, in art restitution “the passage of time is generally biggest hurdle.”
In this case Ms. Burgess and Mr. Kline had the added challenge of establishing that a forced sale is equivalent to theft – but in 2008, they did just that. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed, and its decision was the first time a U.S. court ruled that a forced sale is a theft and title does not transfer to the buyer.
“To us it may seem obvious, but from legal perspective it is a very important holding,” she says.
Today Ms. Burgess spends about 80 percent of her time on art restitution cases, representing “any kind of party you can think of in an art case,” including auction houses, collectors, and domestic and foreign museums, and tackling a wide variety of issues. This coming spring she will also teach a course – Art, Cultural Heritage and the Law – in GW’s Law School.
The course will touch on copyright and First Amendment issues, how museums operate, how much control governments can assert, warranties provided by buyers and sellers, as well as addressing some cultural heritage issues.
“It’s a growing area [of law],” Ms. Burgess says. “It’s all very fascinating, and all the cases are a little different.”
Read the entire article at GW Alumni.