Thinking About the Elgin Marbles

In the early nineteenth century, a British Lord removed much of the sculpture from the Parthenon and shipped it to England. Housed in the British Museum and named after their exporter, the Elgin Marbles have become a source of international controversy. The Greeks wish to see the Marbles returned to the Acropolis and their position is supported by a growing movement seeking the repatriation of cultural property. The Elgin Marbles are representative of the many works of art in the world\u27s museums and private collections that could be subject to repatriation. Rejecting the emotional appeal of the Greek position, Professor Merryman analyzes the controversy and the proper disposition of the Marbles on reasoned, principled grounds. He concludes that the Greeks do not have a legal claim to the Marbles and that moral arguments fail to justify the return of the Marbles to Greece. Professor Merryman then turns to general principles that should govern the allocation of cultural property. He rejects cultural nationalism as a basis for the disposition of the Marbles, because cultural nationalism expresses dubious values and is founded on sentiment. The concerns of cultural internationalism - preservation, integrity, and distribution/ access - do not clearly support the Greek position. Under the general principle of repose, the Elgin Marbles should remain in the British Museum until the Greek government can offer more compelling reasons for their retur

The Refrigerator of Bernard Buffet

What remedies are available to an artist whose creation, a decorated refrigerator, is dismantled by its purchaser and sold panel by panel? Professor Merryman discusses this and other legal problems that artists face, analyzes the application to these problems of the civil law concept of the artist\u27s moral right, and discusses the possible adaptation of such a right to the American legal system

Measuring the Duration of Judicial and Administrative Proceedings

A method of estimating the probable duration of litigation is useful for a variety of purposes. First, the probable duration of a case may, to some extent, determine strategy in litigation since prolonged litigation is often perceived as an appreciable cost to one party and as a benefit to the other. An estimate of the duration of a criminal case, for example, probably influences the respective postures of a defendant and a prosecutor in plea bargaining. Similarly, civil litigants may be able to use an estimate of the probable duration of litigation, together with other factors, in deciding whether to sue, defend, or settle. Second, a forecast of the probable duration of litigation may help improve the efficiency of our judicial system. On a general level,such an estimate provides information needed in the formation of policy for judicial administration. More specifically, it may help determine the relative efficiency of various courts and administrative tribunals in adjudicating different types of cases and thus provide a valuable aid in assigning cases and staffing courts and tribunals. Finally, the estimate may be useful in the study of law and social change. The duration of litigation is one quantitative measure of legal activity that, in combination with other legal, social, economic and political data, may permit the development of hypotheses about law and society that can be tested empirically. In this way, an index of the duration of litigation may prove to be a basic working tool for an empirical social science of the law

Unstable Identities: The European Court of Human Rights and the Margin of Appreciation

All legal systems work under a master narrative – the self-conception of most actors of the system itself. A master narrative is a short and simple story and it is the underlying premise upon which any legal system is based. It is a simple story because it paints the system in quick broad brushstrokes and at (most) times is oblivious to the paradoxes within it. Furthermore, a master narrative is important for legitimization purposes because the actors’ legitimacy will depend on their (perceived) conformity with the system’s master narrative. Therefore, legitimacy is self-referential; the yardsticks for a legitimate action are contained within the system’s master narrative, not outside of it. When talking about different international courts it is important to remember that they are embedded within a master narrative that is contextual and contingent and, at different points, more or less contested. This paper explores the question of what happens when the master-narrative is in a period of transition (from a state cantered to a post-national world order) and when the actors’ legitimacy, their interpretative endeavours the very fundamentals are in a state of flux. I use the margin of appreciation discussion as a focal point of describing the conflicting narratives under which the European Court of Human Rights works, narratives in which the different actors (judges, attorneys, NGO activists, government agents) and their consequences in terms of the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights

The Global Dominance of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law

The world’s biggest consumer markets – the European Union and the United States – have adopted different approaches to regulating competition. This has not only put the EU and US at odds in high-profile investigations of anticompetitive conduct, but also made them race to spread their regulatory models. Using a novel dataset of competition statutes, we investigate this race to influence the world’s regulatory landscape and find that the EU’s competition laws have been more widely emulated than the US’s competition laws. We then argue that both “push” and “pull” factors explain the appeal of the EU’s competition regime: the EU actively promotes its model through preferential trade agreements and has an administrative template that is easy to emulate. As EU and US regulators offer competing regulatory models in domains as diverse as privacy, finance, and environmental protection, our study sheds light on how global regulatory races are fought and won