In 2013, Apsara Iyer, a rising second-year college student at Yale University, was doing archeological fieldwork in Tanesar, a village in northern India, interviewing community members who had seen prized artifacts looted from the local temple—specifically, nine statues depicting mother goddesses. She had always been interested in the intersection of economics and cultural heritage—how markets and local individuals value objects of significance—and was on her way to a future in academia. But as Iyer was recording observations and testimony, a local man challenged the college student. When are the matas [mother goddess statues] coming home? Iyer recalls him saying.
For years, that conversation stayed with Iyer. After college and grad school in economics, she understood she wanted to focus on answering that precise question. Her background and interests led her to law, specifically a job with the antiquities trafficking unit (ATU), a specialized unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York. After a few years working at the ATU, Iyer entered Harvard Law School, where antiquities repatriation and cultural heritage law remained a cornerstone of her professional path. To Iyer, “Art law is profoundly interesting.” She continues:
Like environmental law, it’s a field that is shaped by a finite and scarce resource. We’re not going to get another Parthenon marble or ancient city of Palmyra. When cultural heritage is destroyed, it’s gone forever. Figuring out how to preserve and protect those resources through legal work and the tools brought to bear by the law is incredibly valuable.
The cadre of lawyers who engage in art and antiquities repatriation, restitution, and cultural heritage work is a small community. This niche specialty, however, is increasingly becoming more well-known and institutionalized through a combination of media attention, formal structures like the ATU, and high-profile cases, such as antiquities stolen during conflict or by colonial powers or art taken by the Nazis through forced transactions.
Like environmental law, [art law] is a field that is shaped by a finite and scarce resource.
Apsara Iyer, investigative analyst and chief of staff, antiquities trafficking unit, Manhattan District Attorney’s Office
Around the world, when priceless pieces of cultural heritage go missing—like the mother goddess statues in India—whether a community or a descendent has a lawyer to help them navigate the process of recovery can make all the difference. In this story, we speak to three people engaging in this work from different perspectives: Iyer, who has worked with prosecutors at the ATU to meticulously piece together the timeline of stolen objects; Nicholas O’Donnell, a private practice lawyer who started an art law practice area within his law firm and has argued Nazi-era restitution cases before the Supreme Court; and Bradley Gordon, a corporate lawyer who, somewhat circuitously, has spent the past decade mediating between prosecutors, the Cambodian government, museums, and former looters to help repatriate priceless artifacts. Each of these narratives offers a slice of the critical roles lawyers are playing—from prosecuting collectors and museums to litigating in court to connecting the players—in protecting the cultural heritage of communities.
Creating a practice
In 2020, Nicholas O’Donnell, a partner in the law firm Sullivan & Worcester, argued a case before the Supreme Court, The Federal Republic of Germany. v. Philipp, on behalf of the descendants of a consortium of Jewish art dealers who sold items under duress during the Nazi reign of power. It was a “unique intellectual challenge” for O’Donnell, who not only had to first argue that his plaintiffs could sue the Republic of Germany but also tried the case over the phone from his firm’s conference room in July 2020 during the height of the pandemic. While the court ultimately decided that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) barred the plaintiffs from suing a foreign government, O’Donnell still thinks about the moral and historical implications of the case. “I am still outraged that Germany just simply didn’t return those things to my clients before they ever hired me,” he said.
How did O’Donnell even end up on the phone arguing about events that took place in the 1930s? In the late 1990s, the Association of Art Museum Directors issued its task force guidance on how museums should handle art confiscated by or sold under the Nazis. O’Donnell, a recent art history graduate at Williams College, had secured a position with the Clark Art Institute. At about the same time, a group of 44 countries came together to sign the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, further pledging to identify and return art appropriated by the Nazis. To the museum’s credit, O’Donnell says, the Clark took the guidance seriously, tasking the recent college graduate with investigating the provenance of their collection. Soon after, intrigued by the intersection of art history and the law, O’Donnell decided to go to law school. And while he may not have entered explicitly thinking about becoming an art lawyer, the experiences from the Clark stayed with him. He began working in general litigation at Sullivan & Worcester after graduating, and then, after 10 years at the firm, he began thinking—as a partner does—about how to grow his business.
“Some of the best advice I got for business development purposes was to just keep active the networks you have. And the best way to do that is to dive into the things that you find interesting,” O’Donnell said. For him, that was this intersection of art and the law.
It was 2011 when he pitched his firm on the idea of creating an outward-facing art and museum law practice—they didn’t say no. He recalls a curious but appropriate response, and an admonition not to spend too much money at first. To kick things off, he started a blog—the Art Law Report—and began to curate an expertise and a name. In writing the blog, he tried to show the world how he thought about these complicated issues. “Have an opinion, have a little bit of a sense of humor, and give people a peek of what it’s like to deal with me in the exercise of my intellectual analysis. If you’re in the trenches with me, this is kind of how I approach things,” he says of his strategy. One thing led to another. Media began reaching out, and eventually clients.
It’s hard to present the best evidence and counter evidence when it’s stale and hearsay and the people with personal knowledge have been dead for 50 years. But it’s also too important to ignore.
Nicholas O’Donnell, partner, Sullivan & Worcester
Today, the practice is a unique pillar of the firm’s expertise, one of only about 60 in the United States that specialize in this kind of work (including some large firms like Quinn Emanuel and Norton Rose). At Sullivan & Worcester, while O’Donnell remains the lynchpin, the practice has grown to include eight other lawyers whose work touches on art-related cases, including nonprofit and estate planning. “We have a very generalist staffing model, which is what I’ve always liked about being a litigator here,” O’Donnell says. “I don’t have specialist art law associates or art law colleagues—I think that makes me a better lawyer, that I’m doing zoning cases and corporate finance cases and international banking disputes alongside art and copyright,” O’Donnell says.
O’Donnell’s art law cases, however, present a particular challenge. He says:
One of the biggest tensions in the practice … is the legal systems of all the countries involved in the present day are really ill suited to this. These claims are, as a factual matter, very, very old, and courts don’t like old claims for many good reasons. It’s hard to present the best evidence and counter evidence when it’s stale and hearsay and the people with personal knowledge have been dead for 50 years. But it’s also too important to ignore.
O’Donnell is willing to go to court—and has—on behalf of his clients, but in the last few decades, only a couple of Nazi-era transactions have successfully been reclaimed through litigation. For O’Donnell, then, the moral dimension is critical—increasingly, he has clients coming to him with pieces they’ve inherited who think the provenance story they’ve been told is not reliable or who are discovering new information about their family heirlooms. In these situations, the Sullivan & Worcester partner finds himself acting as a trusted counselor, not just on the legal ramifications of keeping a piece or pursuing litigation but on what the range of consequences will be depending on their decision. Acting as a counselor, he says—not just advising on the legal ramifications but on the reputational—is an important part of all lawyering. “I think a good lawyer is always trying to inform their clients and get their clients thinking so that when the client makes a decision, the client’s informed in the best way. My job is to advise the client so that they understand their rights and obligations and, as much as I can, the ramifications of the decision they’re going to make. But it is their decision,” he says.
Translating cultural value and arguing what’s right
Seventeen years ago, Bradley Gordon was burned out with international business law practice and decided to move to Cambodia to explore other avenues. For a while, he dabbled in nonlaw activities—venture capital, for one; starting a contemporary art gallery, for another. Eventually, he fell back into what he knew, starting a small-business law practice in Phnom Penh. In 2012 he read an article about the systemic looting of artifacts across Cambodia. He immediately wrote to the writer, Tess Davis, an advocate for an antiquities trafficking awareness organization, asking what he could do. Davis put him in touch with the Department of Justice; soon after, Gordon became a consultant for the U.S. government aiding in the search for a particular stolen statue, the subject of a case involving Sotheby’s. “I spent a couple months going all over the country interviewing people… I started to get a sense of how incredibly vast this crime network was, and that it was thousands of temples that were looted, not just one,” he says.
While Gordon’s tenure as a consultant ended, he couldn’t stop. He connected with former looters who could look through books of Cambodian antiquities sitting in far-off museums and private collections and recall the day and time they cut that statute from its historical berth. Gordon made it his mission to continue to act as a mediator between Cambodia and the collectors who had claimed his adopted country’s heritage. Today, Gordon has helped repatriate more than 300 antiquities to Cambodia. He was officially appointed as a lawyer for the Ministry of Culture in 2018—in addition to being given citizenship and knighthood—and has personally led negotiations with the family of Douglas Latchford, a collector who funded much of the historical looting of Cambodia over the past few decades. After Latchford passed away, Gordon negotiated with the family until they agreed to return the entire collection of antiquities back to Cambodia. But the work is not yet done. In addition to his personal collection, Latchford sold and donated hundreds of objects to museums and collectors around the world, including places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met).
Spending 10 years writing prospectuses has been helpful. I know how to tell a story from that work. I learned good drafting skills. And probably most importantly, the corporate work gave me enormous connections all over the world.
Bradley Gordon, lawyer, Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture
Gordon’s entrée into the work was circuitous, but today, he maintains a legal and business advisory—Edenbridge Asia, which helps with M&A, real estate, and due diligence in Southeast Asia—while continuing to recover looted antiquities. His experience in corporate law remains fruitful, not only to fund these recovery efforts but in providing him with the tools necessary to do the work.
“Spending 10 years writing prospectuses has been helpful,” Gordon says. “I know how to tell a story from that work. I learned good drafting skills. And probably most importantly, the corporate work gave me enormous connections all over the world.”
Still, Gordon admits he had much to learn when he began investigating stolen antiquities: media training for one, which has been essential to recovery but was less important in his corporate law career. “What has been fascinating is to realize that for the media, each one needs their own story and they want something unique, but they also don’t want something too complex.” Gordon has had crews from the BBC and ABC News Australia, as well as Anderson Cooper, embed with his team to truly understand how they investigate and recover stolen antiquities. Building negative attention around museums and collectors through press has been one productive strategy.
“The one lesson I’ve come out of all this with is that the current laws protecting cultural heritage are not enough,” Gordon says. In a perfect world, he wishes the burden of proof was on the museums to show legal possession, but that’s not how the current system operates. “We have to be creative and really push things again and again and make the argument that it’s not just about law. It’s about doing the right thing,” Gordon says. In September, Gordon was barred from a meeting with his client by the Met. “The statues were stolen during a time of war and genocide, so why is a museum as powerful as the Met refusing returns and using such tactics?” Gordon asks.
Unlike O’Donnell, Gordon has yet to litigate for this work. While he notes that he always remains prepared for litigation, he says that he also realizes that the law is not always the most useful tool to accomplish what he sets out to do. Instead, he frames the issues in terms of right and wrong. “I was with a senior museum administrator the other day,” Gordon recalled, “and he said, ‘You’ve done such a good job to make this not about just the law [but] . . . about morals.”
Pursuing repatriation at the government
When Iyer arrived at the ATU in 2018 as an investigative analyst, she had little formal knowledge of art or antiquities. Instead, she was armed with a robust knowledge of the art market and a self-taught passion for antiquities from visiting museums, researching auctions, and tracking gallery sales. What she discovered at the ATU was a collaborative team of prosecutors, Homeland Security agents, and analysts with a full range of skills and backgrounds, from curatorial to securities studies. These days, her economic lens has increasingly become important, with ISIS and other terrorist organizations using antiquities trafficking to generate revenue and launder illicit financial proceeds.
Since its inception in 2017, the ATU “has recovered more than 5,700 antiquities valued at more than $450 million, and returned more than 4,600 to more than 25 countries” (according to press releases from their office). Led by Matthew Bogdanos, a former marine and classics scholar who previously oversaw an investigation into the destruction and looting of Iraq’s National Museum, the ATU is the first of its kind in the United States. (Only Italy, which formed an art crime police unit in 1969, has a bigger unit devoted to such a cause.)
Sometimes you may be trying to track down what happened over a span of 80 years, but other times you might have a gap in a one-week window of intense digital activity.
Apsara Iyer
If Iyer was unsure about law school before joining the ATU, her time there was a crash course in art law and provided any additional motivation she needed. “Each day in the DA’s office was like sitting in an emergency room for law,” she says. There, she was “inundated with legal terminology and process, juggling witnesses and law-enforcement officers—a real ground-up view of what goes into appearing in a courtroom,” she says. The work is difficult—investigations require persistence and meticulously tracking evidence from around the world. “In each case, the prosecution has the burden to prove that an object was stolen—but the precise manner in which that’s proven can vary piece by piece. Sometimes you may be trying to track down what happened over a span of 80 years, but other times you might have a gap in a one-week window of intense digital activity,” Iyer explains. “These cases are only further complicated if witnesses have died or records have been lost or destroyed. But the law draws no distinction between direct and circumstantial evidence—and sometimes gaps may be filled based on a reasonable deduction from circumstantial clues,” she says. In one case, she says, she knew which typewriter was used to print a fraudulent export permit. Could she prove other export permits were printed on that same typewriter? Could it lead the team to more objects? Technology has helped. In one interview, Bogdanos said that the pandemic caused more museums to put their collections online, which has been a boon to the ATU in its search for stolen objects. Iyer, for her part, says technology has been critical in helping her find and speak with more witnesses around the world.
Iyer was so taken by the work, she continued to work with the unit while a student at Harvard Law School, including taking a leave of absence after her first year to work full-time on the Michael Steinhardt investigation, which ultimately resulted in the collector surrendering $70 million worth of antiquities to the Manhattan DA’s office and being given a lifetime ban on collecting further objects. During the investigation, Iyer was instrumental in putting together the statement of facts, which included unique vignettes of 180 stolen antiquities. For Iyer, who cites the tangible human impact of the work as her motivation, writing the statement of facts was a valuable experience—in each object, Iyer saw “the wide breadth of what we do and how each piece had its own unique individual story.” In it, she saw something bigger than the law.
What’s changing for the interdisciplinary practice
Ten years after her time in North India, Iyer would end up helping bring one of the mother goddesses home. But, she reminds us: “Something that is lost in these stories: it might seem like that every time we investigate a piece, we recover it, but just as many stolen pieces are never traced or found,” says Iyer.
The formation of the ATU has certainly helped change the market in New York City. Gordon is trying to make similar buzz happen around antiquities from Cambodia. “The most effective thing we can do is kill the market. If people don’t want to buy illegal antiquities anymore, there’s probably not going to be as much looting,” Gordon says. For his part in this, he has found a valuable role in acting as a mediator between U.S. and foreign governments, museums, and the Cambodian government. He admires the work of Bogdanos’s team and the federal prosecutors. “I’ve had a lot of discussions with them about why this is so important for the country and what the impact of this crime is. It’s not just taking objects—the Cambodians regard them as souls and living spirits. I’m very much in the role of being a translator,” he says.
For me the part that is the most rewarding is the very real, human impact—being able to directly talk to people who are connected to the pieces—scholars or governments or communities who may each value that object in different ways.
Apsara Iyer
Lawyers are certainly one piece of the puzzle, but not the only piece. Museums are also increasingly hiring provenance researchers, often after pressure from the public and law enforcement. After a number of seizures, the Met finally put together a team to dive into their vast holdings. (Still, as Gordon maintains, this is not enough. The Met has not introduced the team to Gordon, and he continues to argue for full access to and the right to photograph provenance documents, including for statues recently returned by the Met.) Gordon works with a diverse group of people, mainly Cambodians, including a wildlife expert, archeologists, inscription experts, and conservation experts. “There’s a growing awareness that this is an intersectional issue that requires a breadth of expertise from cultural historians to forensic experts to lawyers,” says Iyer.
And all three lawyers have pointed to a growing awareness and greater attention to antiquities trafficking and museum collections overall as a boon to their practice. “Thirty years ago, if you brought a painting to a major auction house, there likely would have been no scrutiny about its history between 1933 and 1945. No one would even ask questions,” says O’Donnell. “And that has changed considerably today for the better.”
Still, amid changing public perception around the art market, what remains is the importance of cultural value. “For me the part that is the most rewarding is the very real, human impact—being able to directly talk to people who are connected to the pieces—scholars or governments or communities who may each value that object in different ways,” says Iyer.
