The Library

Below is a list of books and journals that the Center for Art Law compiles in our quest to keep track of the art law publications and relevant scholarship.

If you are working on a new title, or your book is already out, and you would like to have it included in the Repository, please send us information about it (Title, Author/Editor(s), Date of Publication; ISBN, short summary, link to your publisher/distributor).

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615 results
CfAL Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage Cover

Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage and the Law: A Research Companion

Alberta Fabbricotti
English
September 2024

“The world has been shocked by the destruction of world cultural heritage sites over the past two decades, as seen in widely disseminated videos depicting events such as the demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. These acts are perhaps the clearest and most glaring examples of what is meant by the ‘Intentional Destruction of the Cultural Heritage of Humankind’ (IDCHH).

The book explores in detail the remedies against IDCHH available under international law. These remedies are defined as all the lawful responses provided for both by customary law and by the special responsibility regimes created under the many substantive areas of international law. The examination includes UNESCO instruments and UN measures for the maintenance of international peace, mechanisms for the protection of human rights and those for the protection of investments, and international criminal justice outcomes through the decisions of the Permanent Criminal Court. Thus, the book explores avenues for response such as appeals to international courts, peacekeeping operations and referrals to the criminal legislation of States, in addition to reparations. The concept of the Cultural Heritage of Humankind implies that IDCHH harms all States and all peoples and human groupings in the world, not only the State or people on whose territory the cultural property is located. The book identifies the international law avenues for subjects not directly injured by IDCHH to obtain its cessation and reparation.”

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Alberta Fabbricotti, Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage and the Law: A Research Companion, September 2024
CfAL Case of Disappearing Gauguin Cover

The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market

Stephanie A. Brown
English
July 2024

“A globetrotting Gold Rush heiress. An awkward Paris schoolmaster. A celebrated French actor. And a museum of history and art in California’s Central Valley. What do they have in common? They are all connected by an oil painting, a still life called Flowers and Fruit, that may or may not have been painted by the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin.

In the decade that museums began to collect modern art, Flowers and Fruit traveled the art market in Paris and New York. Experts and connoisseurs hailed it as a signature work of Gauguin just as he came to be acknowledged as a master. When it joined the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, locals treasured it as “the Museum’s Gauguin.”

But by 1964, Gauguin scholars and experts in Paris and New York had lost track of the painting and declared it lost. When it resurfaced in 2018, they questioned its authenticity. How could a genuine Gauguin have been hiding in plain sight in a provincial American museum?

Is Flowers and Fruit a forgery or is it authentic? Follow along as historian, curator, and professor of museum studies Dr. Stephanie Brown traces the unlikely history of the painting. Using never-before-seen archives and making new connections, Brown writes the biography of a painting―and explores what we mean by authenticity and who gets to define it.

Now undergoing technical examination as a result of Dr. Brown’s findings, Flowers and Fruit has embarked on a new chapter of its life. If the painting is authentic, it will be the most valuable painting in the Haggin’s collection―and one of the most important paintings in California. And if the painting is a forgery, who was the forger?”

Cite

Stephanie A. Brown, The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market, July 2024
CfAL Contemporary Artificial Art Cover

Contemporary Artificial Art and the Law: Searching for an Author

Gianmaria Ajani
English
October 2020

“The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an “autonomous author” urges the law to rethink authorship, originality, creativity. AI-generated artworks are in search of an author because current copyright laws offer as a solution only public domain or fragile regulatory mechanisms. During the 20th century visual artists have been posing persistent challenges to the law world: Conceptual Art favoured legal mechanisms alternative to copyright law. The case of AI-art is, however, different: for the first time the artworld is discovering the prospective of an art without human authors. Rather than preserving the status quo in the law world, policy makers should consider a reformative conception of AI in copyright law and take inspiration from innovative theories in the field of robot law, where new frames for a legal personhood of artificial agents are proposed. This would have a spill-over effect also on copyright regulations.”

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Gianmaria Ajani, Contemporary Artificial Art and the Law: Searching for an Author, October 2020
CfAL Copyright and Patent Laws Cover

Copyright and Patent Laws for the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Eva Janecková
English
August 2025

This book responds to the need to distinguish human creations from those produced by AI. It does so by tracing human attributes of authorship and inventorship in statutory requirements for protection and ownership in European copyright and patent laws.

Its main contribution lies in exposing shortcomings in how the laws are applied in the UK, Germany, and France. It shows that the human origin of creations is traditionally inferred from their expressive form or technical character. Given the advancements in AI, such inferences are no longer legitimate. What is more, these shortcomings may eventually lead to granting copyright or patent protection where none is lawfully permitted or sufficiently justified. To remedy the situation, this book offers doctrinal and conceptual amendments and proposes law reforms to implement them.

This book guides authorities, practitioners, and students through the main arguments of the debate concerning copyright and patents for objects entirely or partly generated by AI. It also makes original contributions to advance the ongoing academic and policy debates on AI and intellectual property law.”

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Eva Janecková, Copyright and Patent Laws for the Age of Artificial Intelligence, August 2025
CfAL FromTheseRootsCover

From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy

Tamara Lanier
English
January 2025

One woman’s unrelenting mission to reclaim her ancestors’ history and honor their lineage pits her against one of the country’s most powerful institutions: Harvard University.

Tamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother’s stories about her ancestors […] Her discovery of a nineteenth-century daguerreotype at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, one of the first-ever photos of enslaved people from Africa, reveals a dark-skinned man with short-cropped silver hair and chiseled cheekbones. The information read “Renty, Congo.” All at once, Lanier knew she was staring at the ancestor her mother told her so much about—Papa Renty.

In a compelling account covering more than a decade of her own research, Lanier takes us on her quest to prove her genealogical bloodline to Papa Renty’s that pits her in a legal battle against Harvard and its army of lawyers. The question is, who has claim to the stories, artifacts, and remnants of America’s stained history—the institutions who acquired and housed them for generations, or the descendants who have survived?

From These Roots is not only a historical record of one woman’s lineage but a call to justice that fights for all those demanding to reclaim, honor, and lay to rest the remains of mishandled lives and memories.”

Cite

Tamara Lanier, From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy, January 2025