Fiorentini, Francesca --- "A legal pluralist approach to international trade in cultural objects" [2014] ELECD 300; in Nafziger, A.R. James; Paterson, Kirkwood Robert (eds), "Handbook on the Law of Cultural Heritage and International Trade" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014) 589

Book Title: Handbook on the Law of Cultural Heritage and International Trade

Editor(s): Nafziger, A.R. James; Paterson, Kirkwood Robert

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781007334

Section: Chapter 24

Section Title: A legal pluralist approach to international trade in cultural objects

Author(s): Fiorentini, Francesca

Number of pages: 34

Abstract/Description:

Cultural property trade arouses the interest of comparative lawyers for at least three reasons. It does so, first, because of the difficulty in determining the legal ontology of cultural property. The legal notion of "cultural property" emerged for the first time at the level of international law with the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of 1954, as meaning "anything [movable or immovable] which bears witness to the artistry, history and identity of a particular culture." As Antonio Gambaro puts it, "the problem of cultural property is that it includes any object which is capable of conveying a meta-individual message." The cultural relevance of this message depends on the subjects using the cultural property, or having access to it. Indeed, their values may change in space and time, in the same way as culture changes. The many functions that cultural property can play as well as the plurality of its users have thus led to a legal regime which is complex and intricate. This intricacy introduces the second point of interest for comparative lawyers. It is the transnational, global character of cultural property that strongly impacts on the domestic regimes, creating a "multilayered" and "de-centralized" structure of the sources of cultural property law. This fragmentation of the sources of law has been emphasized by globalizationand the Internet, and has resulted in the blurring of the classic separation between private and public actors in the law-making activity.