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.
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(with Linda Mulcahy) 'Limiting Law: Art in the Street and Street in the Art'
Law, Culture and the Humanities (2016) pp.1-23
Conventional legal responses to street
art have tended to characterize it as a problem that is best dealt regulated
through criminal or property law. This is not necessarily perceived of as a
problem by street artists who have actively sought to situate understandings of
their work outside of the law. But attitudes are changing. Street art is
increasingly seen as having commercial value, enhancing the cityscape, creating
new local art markets, attracting tourists, and contributing to the
gentrification of impoverished areas. The result is that conventional ways of
conceiving of street art have begun to pose new challenges to concepts of crime
and property. Drawing on an observational study in London, this article proposes
a new theorization of the legal problems posed by street art that pays close
attention to the sensual experience of encountering it in the city and to street
art as performance rather than artefact.
click here for full text via SAGE [ON CAMPUS]
click here for full text via SAGE [OFF CAMPUS]
'The Ends of the Museum' (May 29, 2013). Law Society and Economy Working
Paper Series No. 14/2013
In recent years, there have been a plethora of cases in which museums have had to release treasured pieces. New legal initiatives and developments increasingly make repatriation claims by source nations and other single or group ‘original owners’ possible, most recently in the area of illicitly-trafficked antiquities. Recent scholarship radically questions the genealogy and functions of the museum, and its relationship with the concepts of space, culture, and identity. In terms of space, there have been analyses that place the museum at the centre of disciplinary projects, ‘civilizing rituals’, architectural expressions of the diremptions in the genealogies and cultural histories of modernity. In terms of culture and identity, there have been similar deconstructions of the links between nation-building and housing art and artefacts. Museums are now searching for strategies to protect their collections from the loss of authority and status that attend repatriation claims in this climate of criticism. Yet, do museums collude in this loss of authority by joining in the ‘propertization’ of their collections? Embedded in the notion of modern museology is the primacy of the object. This, arguably, aids the legal and political initiatives that permit deaccessioning of objects, imposing external requirements on the retention or return of certain types of collections, and regulating the relationship between the collector and the museum.
available via SSRN
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.
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‘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)
