Protecting Cultural Heritage: International Law after the War in Iraq

Participants

Principal organizers

Lawrence Rothfield is Faculty Director of Cultural Policy Center, and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Rothfield co-founded the Center after serving as director and co-founder of the University's Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. His major publications include Vital Signs, about the social function of the 19th-century novel; The Measure of Man, a forthcoming study of the politics of culture in the Florentine Renaissance; and a volume of edited essays on the Brooklyn Museum controversy, Unsettling "Sensation": Arts Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy. He is producing a report on the series of policy missteps that led to the failure to protect the Baghdad Museum and Iraqi archeological sites from looting following the 2003 war.

McGuire Gibson is Professor of Archaeology, The Oriental Institute, and President of the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq. He is a key figure in pre-war efforts to persuade the U.S. government to protect sites in Iraq from destruction and looting, representing the interests of academic archaeologists, and speaks to the ways in which the government interacts with outside experts in planning process. In May 2003, shortly after the American invasion of Iraq, he visited Iraq as part of a UNESCO mission to inspect the fate of the country's museums and archeological sites.

Respondent

Eric Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law, the University of Chicago. He is author, with Jack Goldsmith, of The Limits of International Law (Oxford, 2005), and Law and Social Norms (Harvard, 2000); and editor of Chicago Lectures in Law and Economics (Foundation, 2000) and, with Matthew Adler, Cost-Benefit Analysis: Legal, Economic, and Philosophical Perspectives (University of Chicago, 2001). He is also an editor of the Journal of Legal Studies. He has published articles on bankruptcy law, contract law, international law, cost-benefit analysis, constitutional law, and administrative law, and has taught courses on international law, foreign relations law, contracts, employment law, bankruptcy law, secured transactions, and game theory and the law. His current research focuses on international law, including the laws of war, international adjudication, and war crimes trials. He is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School . Born: 1965. Education: B.A., M.A. 1988, Yale University ; J.D. 1991, Harvard University .

Moderator

Kenneth Dam has devoted his career to public policy issues. He has served as deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Treasury (2001-2003) and the U.S. Department of State (1982-1985). In 1973, he was executive director of the Council on Economic Policy, a White House office responsible for coordinating U.S. domestic and international economic policy. From 1971 to 1973, he served as assistant director for national security and international policy of the Office of Management and Budget. He began his Washington career as law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Whittaker (1957-1958). He began his academic career at the University of Chicago in 1960. From 1980 to 1982, he served as University provost. Most of his academic work has focused on law and economics, particularly on international issues. His publications include The GATT: Law and International Economic Organization; Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines (with George P. Shultz); and, most recently, The Rules of the Global Game: A New Look at U.S. International Policymaking. Dam also was IBM vice president for law and external relations (1985- 992), and president and chief executive officer of the United Way of America for a six-month period in 1992, when he was chosen to address scandal in the organization and establish a new governance system. He has extensive experience as an arbitrator, including five years as the system arbitrator for professional basketball. He is a senior fellow and member of the board of the Brookings Institution; a member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee and of the National Academies' Science, Technology and Law Panel; former chairman of the German-American Academic Council; and a board member for nonprofit institutions including the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Born: 1932. Education: B.S., 1954, University of Kansas ; J.D., 1957, University of Chicago ; LL.D. (hon.), 1983, New School for Social Research.

Panelists (in alphabetical order)

Matthew Bogdanos is colonel in the U.S. Marine Reserves and leader of the interagency investigation into the Iraqi antiquities looting during Operation Iraqi Freedom. An assistant district attorney in Manhattan since 1988, a middleweight boxer, and a native New Yorker, he holds a degree in classics from Bucknell University, a law degree and a master's degree in classical studies from Columbia University, and a master's degree in strategic studies from the Army War College. Recalled to active duty after September 11, 2001, he received a Bronze Star for counterterrorist operations in Afghanistan, and served two tours of duty in Iraq. He is the recipient of a 2005 National Humanities Medal for his work recovering Iraq's treasures, and the author of the recently published book Thieves of Baghdad: One Marine's Passion for Ancient Civilizations and the Journey to Recover the World's Greatest Stolen Treasures ( Bloomsbury).He plans to return to the district attorney's office where he will continue the hunt for stolen antiquities.

Patrick Boylan is Professor Emeritus of Heritage Policy and Management in the Department of Cultural Policy and Management at City University, London, UK. He directed major UK regional museums, galleries, archives and heritage services for more than 23 years before becoming professor and head of the department at City University in 1990, retiring in 2004. Author of more than 180 publications ranging over contemporary art, geology, history of science, museology and heritage studies, he has served as consultant and advisor on heritage and wider cultural policy and management for 15 national governments and leading international organizations, including UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). His 1992-1993 consultancy for UNESCO and the Dutch government on the apparent failures of the original 1954 Hague Convention to achieve its purpose of protecting important cultural property in several major conflicts—such as the Arab Israeli wars, divided Cyprus, Cambodia and ex-Yugoslavia—resulted in UNESCO's 1993 "Boylan Report. The report led to the development and eventual adoption of the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention in 1999.

Guido Carducci is Chief of the International Standards Section, Division of Cultural Heritage, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He holds a Ph.D in international law (Docteur en droit, University Paris II), a Ph.D in comparative private law (Dottore di ricerca, University Rome I), and diploma from the Hague Academy of International Law. He has taught and published on domestic and international law, private and public, for many years. Carducci was a member of the Italian delegation to UNESCO for negotiation of the 2001 Convention for the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. His memberships include the International Law Association Committee on Cultural Heritage Law and Société Française pour le Droit International.

Patty Gerstenblith has been Professor of Law at DePaul University College of Law since 1984. She is director of DePaul's program in art and cultural heritage law, and co-chair of the American Bar Association's International Cultural Property Committee. She was editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Cultural Property from1995 to 2002, and served as a public representative on the President's Cultural Property Advisory Committee in the U.S. Department of State from 2000 to 2003. She is also the current President of the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation. Her most recent books include Art, Cultural Heritage and the Law and Iraq Beyond the Headlines: History, Archaeology and War, co-authored with Benjamin R. Foster and Karen Polinger Foster. She received her J.D. from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Fine Art and Anthropology.

Jan Hladik is Programme Specialist of the International Standards Section, Division of Cultural Heritage, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Born in Prague, he graduated with honors from the International Law Faculty of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and received a juris doctor diploma from the Charles University in Prague. After two years working in the Czechoslovak Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he joined UNESCO; since November 1992, he has worked in the International Standards Section of the Division of Cultural Heritage in Paris, currently as a programme specialist in charge of the implementation of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and its 1954 and 1999 Protocols. He has published professional journal articles on the Hague Convention and related issues, and has participated in a number of UNESCO's official missions, including the March 1999 Hague Diplomatic Conference on the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention.