Tatiana Flessas
Email: T.Flessas@lse.ac.uk
Administrative support: Bradley Barlow
Room: New Academic Building 7.27
Tel. 020-7955-6077
Tatiana Flessas holds a BA in Philosophy from Wellesley College, a JD from
Northeastern University School of Law, and an LLM and PhD from the London School
of Economics. Before joining the LSE, she practiced law in the US and taught at
the University of Reading School of Law. Her research interests are in cultural
property and heritage law, law and social theory, and law and literature.
Research interests
My research is in the area of cultural property and legal theory,
focussing on the emergence of cultural property regulation and heritage
legislation as discourses of modernity. I look at the problems of
defining cultural property, the controversy surrounding the ownership of
the Parthenon Marbles, and how museums and the repatriation of ancient
skeletons fit within the debates regarding the cultural commons. My work
draws on modern philosophy from Nietzsche onwards, as well as literary
theory.
Murphy, Roberts & Flessas, Understanding Property Law, 4th
Edition (Sweet & Maxwell 2004)
Understanding Property Law provides a background to an area
of law which is notoriously inaccessible. Standing back from
their subject, the authors of this book elucidate how the
practices of the past have shaped the development and form
of the modern law. In doing so they stress the role of
lawyers in the transactions - such as sale, gift and
inheritance - in which their clients become involved. This
focus upon the work which lawyers do in their offices
provides a necessary complement to the emphasis on
legislation and adjudication found in most textbooks.
click here
for publisher's site
Flessas, T and Holder, J. (2008) “Emerging Commons”, Social and Legal Studies
Journal 17(3), Special Issue 2008 (21 pages).
‘The Repatriation Debate and the
Discourse of the Commons' published in LSE Law, Society and
Economy Working Paper Series WPS 10-2007 October 2007 [to
be published in Social and Legal Studies, Oct.2008]
What can the concept of ‘the
commons’ lend to cultural property and heritage analysis?
How can it be applied to these areas, if one looks beyond
the protection of solely ‘natural’ resources such as land
(although ‘land’, as a highly regulated substrate bearing a
plethora of significations and values may itself no longer
be considered a ‘natural’ resource)? The debates around
property and culture are more usually understood by
reference to ‘cultural nationalism,’ ‘cultural
internationalism’ and the web of disciplines and resources
that grow between these two traditional approaches, and yet,
these resources leave many problems and issues in this field
unresolved. The discourses that make up commons scholarship
might serve to expand the tool box of cultural property
discourse, in particular where the issues span the most
personal and the most communal problems of all: human
skeletons and repatriation claims. This essay argues that
the very discourse of the commons itself is a strategy, a
means of establishing and policing thresholds that in turn
move according to strategies and desires of acquisition. In
short, designating an object as located within ‘the commons’
is another way of justifying the appropriation of contested
cultural property.
click here for full text
‘The Future Will Not Stop Escaping Us,
The Teaching from the Left: A Conference at Harvard Law School: Part
V: International Law' 31 New York University Review of Law &
Social Change 661 (2006/07)
‘A house haunted by justice: Eichmann
in Jerusalem’ 9 Law Text Culture 215 (2005)
‘Cultural Property Defined, and
Redefined as Nietzschean Aphorism’ 24 Cardozo Law Review 1067
(2003)
‘Sacrificial Stone’ 14(1) Law and
Literature 49 (2002)
