Monuments to the Confederacy and the Right to Destroy in Cultural-Property Law

This Note identifies problems in cultural-property law that the recent wave of removals of Confederate memorials has illustrated. Because cultural-property law’s internal logic tends inexorably towards supporting preservation, it has no conceptual framework for recognizing when a culture might be justified in destroying its own cultural property. I argue that destruction of cultural property can, in some cases, serve values that the preservationist impulse of cultural-property law has overlooked. I propose a new regime for cultural-property law that permits destruction in cases where the monument in question was established in celebration of a violation of the customary international law of human rights

Exceptional Judgments: Revising the Terrorism Exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act

In 2016, family members of victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks sued Iran in the Southern District of New York for aiding and abetting al Qaeda in the perpetration of those attacks. They proceeded under the terrorism exception to foreign sovereign immunity, which allows plaintiffs to sue foreign nations appearing on the State Department\u27s list of state sponsors of terrorism. When Iran failed to appear in court, a judge awarded the class a default judgment of $1.8 billion in damages. The massive judgment was consistent with other terrorism­ exception judgments against Iran; to date, plaintiffs have won at least$50 billion in default judgments of this kind