DePaul’s Center for Art, Museum & Cultural Heritage Law will bring together lawyers, museum professionals, representatives of indigenous communities, and other scholars and experts in the field to examine the repatriation of cultural artifacts. The symposium will be held at DePaul University College of Law on November 14, 2013 and will address the underlying legal, ethical and moral reasons and policies behind the return of cultural objects. Participants will discuss the justification for repatriation requests, evidence concerns, researching provenance, museum issues and the conflicting ethical concerns that confront in-house museum attorneys and other attorneys when a restitution claim is received.

The event is the vision of Distinguished Research Professor Patty Gerstenblith, director of the Center for Art, Museum & Cultural Heritage Law, and of Assistant Professor of Anthropology Morag Kersel, affiliated faculty member of the Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law. Gerstenblith and Kersel are moderating the symposium, in addition to Julie Getzels, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of The Art Institute of Chicago.

Among the confirmed speakers are Jane Levine, Worldwide Director of Compliance for Sotheby’s; Victoria S. Reed, Curator for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;  Lori Breslauer, Acting General Counsel, Legal Affairs Director at the Field Museum of Natural History; Rebecca Tsosie, Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar and Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and Susan Taylor, director at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

More information is available at the symposium’s website.