Who owns the past? Cultural policy, cultural property, and the law

[...] Who Owns the Past? Cultural Policy, Cultural Property and the Law has an ambitious and worthy goal, that is, “to explain the ethical, legal, and practical arguments on which current U.S. policy is based, and to make the cultural property debate comprehensible to all” (p. xiii). The book consists of 29 articles and essays organized under four main headings: I, The Laws; II, Collecting and the Trade; III, Art in Peril; IV, The Universal Museum. Section V, includes Appendices and Links. Some of the articles are updated versions of previously published pieces, while others were commissioned for the volume. Among the topics covered are: the history and development of cultural property law and policy; rights to cultural property and the ethics of collecting; threats to arts and antiquities due to illegal trafficking, looting, as well as war and development; repatriation; roles and responsibilities of museums; and international cooperation for the protection of cultural property. The editor, Kate Fitz Gibbon, provides an abstract of each article in the “Introduction” and an overview of international and national cultural property legislation in the first chapter titled “Chronology of Cultural Property Legislation.” She also is the author of four other essays in the book. [...] see entire review by Christina Kreps here.