Cultural property lawyer (and blogger) Ricardo St. Hilaire responds to Antiquities Ambiguities: Parsing the Legal Arguments in the Battle of the Getty Bronze.
I’m glad you are covering this case.
Cases in Italy can be dragged out for years, as you know. But if the Italians ultimately win, there next big challenge will be to enforce the judgment in the U.S. It’s one thing to win a court case overseas and get an award of cash and then have an American court enforce the money judgment. It’s an entirely different scenario, however, when a foreign court awards a party title to a specific piece of property. Trying to get a U.S. court to recognize that kind of judgment will not be easy.
And below is the Getty Museum’s response, from Ron Hartwig, the Getty Trust’s vice president of communications.
I read your assessment of the judge’s ruling and we vigorously disagree with your conclusion. I’ve attached a timeline with the facts (my links, not his).
Needless to say, the Italian judge presented a conflicting set of facts (as described and analyzed in my above-linked previous post).
The debate and the legal wrangling continue…