Choice of Law and the Art World: Law, Norms, and Institutions

Choice of Law and the Art World: Law, Norms, and Institutions

Billions of dollars of art are stolen or looted every year, yet governments often consider art theft a luxury problem. With limited public law enforcement, what prevents thieves, looters and organised criminal gangs from flooding the market with stolen art? How can theft victims get justice - even decades after their loss? What happens when the legal definition of a good legal title varies across jurisdictions and is at odds with what is morally right? Enter the Art Loss Register, a private database dedicated to tracking down stolen artworks. Blocking the sale of disputed artworks creates a space for private resolutions - often amicable and sometimes entertainingly adversarial. My research examines how restitutions are negotiated and how valuable artworks are retrieved from the economic underworld. A fascinating journey into the dark side of the global art market.

Anja Shortland, Professor of Political Economy, King’s College London

Anja Shortland is a Professor of Political Economy at King’s College London. Anja studies private governance in the world’s trickiest markets: hostages, fine art, and antiquities—and how people live, trade, and invest in complex and hostile territories. Although often based on data analysis, her work usually cuts across disciplinary boundaries adopting techniques and insights from sociology, engineering, geography, politics, international relations and economics. Anja has published widely on the issue of kidnap and hijack for ransom and co-authored the 2013 World Bank Policy Report: "The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat; Rebuilding a Nation."  Her book: Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business is published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Anja was an Engineering and Economics undergraduate at Oxford and then did her Masters and PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics. Before joining King's she worked as a lecturer in Economics at Leicester, a Reader in Economics at Brunel University and as a consultant to the World Bank.