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STEPHEN URICE... The legal shade of art Art, in its fundamental form, is universal. It’s the strum of a guitar, the roar of a tribal song, the slant of a smile in a painting. Unlike commodities, works of art define a culture and are limited. “Cultural property tends not to be consumed, it tends to be preserved,” said Associate Professor Stephen Urice, who lectures nationally and internationally on cultural property and heritage law and policy. To clearly understand the unique field, you have to ask: Who owns the past? Urice begins to answer this question in a book he recently co-edited: Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts, the 5th edition of the standard art law casebook. Urice arrived at Miami Law in 2006 from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he served as a Lecturer in Law in a grant-funded position for three years. He has a JD from Harvard University, which is where he also obtained a master’s degree in Biblical Archaeology and a Ph.D. in Fine Arts. He achieved a B.A. in English from Tufts University. Urice has served on the faculty and planning committee of the American Law Institute American Bar Association (ALI-ABA) course of study Legal Issues in Museum Administration for many years. In 1998, he was appointed to plan and implement The Pew Charitable Trusts’ $50 million cultural policy program – a five-year effort to assist nonprofit cultural organizations participate more fully in the development of cultural policies at local, state and federal levels. When Urice began working in Cultural Property and Heritage Law in the late ‘70s, the field was in its infancy stage. He was intrigued by the dynamics created when archeology, art and law combined. A generation later, the area has vastly grown to include several interests, each meeting at the intersection of artistic expression and legal rights. “We’re going to see more scholarly and legislative activities at the local, state and federal levels, and I think we’re going to see an increase of litigation on these issues and an increase of opportunities for people to practice in these areas,” said Urice. That’s good news for incoming lawyers looking for unique ways to apply practical principles with cases that involve in-depth layers of complex cultural undertones and lengthy histories. Take the controversy over the Elgin Marbles, a case that involves the removal of artifacts from the Parthenon in the first decade of the 19th century. The sculptures, which were removed by the Earl of Elgin, are still housed at the British Museum to this day. Although scholarship has demonstrated that Greece has no legal claim to recover the marbles, that conclusion has not brought the debate to an end. Clearly, in the context of cultural property disputes much more is at stake than the law. More contemporary cases tackle issues such as those raised by the city of Hermosa Beach, which banned the practice of tattooing. The action was ruled unconstitutional in September by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals saying the art form is speech protected by the First Amendment. “The art market is a huge market,” said Urice, who observed that until recently there were only a handful of opportunities to practice in the field. “The business involves billions of dollars a year.” Not to mention, Miami Law is situated in a city fringing on an arts renaissance. “This is an arts community that is happening. That means now, more than ever, there will be more disputes, greater need for legislation pertaining to the unique needs of artists, dealers and collectors, and an increasing interest in scholarly study of the field.”