Law Commons^™

The Underwater: Using Art To Engage Communities Around Climate Action, Xavier Cortada

University of Miami Law Review

This Article delves into the intersection of art and environmental activism, with a focus on the impact of climate change. Cortada, both an artist and trained attorney, re-counts his three-decade journey leveraging art to inspire community engagement and address social and environmental challenges. He explains how Antarctic researchers made him aware of South Florida's vulnerability to sea level rise, leading to the development of interactive art projects that foster civic engagement and climate advocacy. The Article also addresses the challenges posed by climate denial and misinformation, emphasizing the need for creative strategies to combat these issues.

Cortada introduces specific participatory …

How High Fashion Brands And Nfts Are Changing The Future Of The Art Market And Trademark Prosecution, Grace Hodges

DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

The Free Exercise Of Copyright Behind Bars, Viva R. Moffat

Washington and Lee Law Review

People in prison produce vast amounts of creative and expressive work—from paintings and sculptures to essays, novels, music, and NFTs—but they are rarely described as artists and their work is often not described as “art.” Prisoners also do not regularly take advantage of copyright law, the primary form of protection for creative works. They should.

Copyright provides a strong set of rights that combines strains of free expression values with elements of property rights. Copyright confers dignitary and expressive benefits and, for some creators, financial rewards. As such, copyright can be a tool to help prisoners improve their lives, both …

Note: Nft Art Heists: Analyzing Nfts Under U.S. Law And International Conventions On Art Theft, Kevin D. Brum

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

The non-fungible token (“NFT”) is a type of digital asset that is usually associated with an image and has a unique identifier. An NFT cannot be copied or reproduced, and records of NFT transactions are stored on the blockchain. NFTs are a recent innovation and have swept the world by storm. NFT sales tripled from 2019 to 2020 and DappRadar—the premier platform for hosting decentralized NFT portfolio management applications—estimates that NFT sales hit twenty-five billion dollars in 2021. Many NFTs appear to be artistic works and, either individually or in a collection, can be given away for free, sold for …

Foreword, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Most of us think we are familiar with graffiti – lettering on trains or graphic images on walls that follow us as we walk by. But Enrico Bonadio’s new book on graffiti and street art opens a door to more complex and nuanced worlds of artists and their communities. The focus is on everyday creators of graffiti and street art. Built from nearly 100 interviews and hundreds of hours of observation, the book is filled with the voices of artists and vivid details of their plein air studios and interactions. Also present in the book is the author, who weaves …

Law Is In The Bin: New Frontiers In Conceptual Art And Legal Liability, Katelyn E. Doering

Notre Dame Law Review

Part I of this Note begins with a discussion of who Banksy is and why his work is important to this legal debate, finishing with a detailed description of the features of conceptual art that are relevant for legal analysis and an argument that the shredding stunt—the event itself, not the partially shredded canvas—is a work of conceptual art. Part II argues that the unique features of the shredding stunt, and of future works in the same artistic category, present a novel legal problem both for artists and for buyers. This novel problem is explored through the lens of …

The Last Prisoners Of War: How Nazi-Looted Art Is Displayed In U.S. Museums, Monica May Thompson

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

How art museums approach NLA is important today because much of the public relies on museums for their education. NLA cases are especially controversial because they are not only legal battles, but ethical ones so museums have to be extra careful approaching them. Even if the museum has won the legal battle the public may not see them as winning the ethical one therefore they might want to avoid displaying this information to the public. However, as we can see with the previous websites, it actually looks worse for museums not to be open and honest about their NLA pieces …

Law Library Blog (April 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Pills And Picasso: Evaluating The Proposed Liquidation Of The Detroit Institute Of Arts During The Detroit Bankruptcy, Kevin Deutsch

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Part I of this Note provides background information that is helpful for understanding the Detroit bankruptcy, the role of the DIA in the bankruptcy, and municipal bankruptcies in general. Part II evaluates equitable arguments against a sale of the DIA’s collection. Part III provides a rationale for a partial sale of the DIA’s collection.

Artworks As Business Entities: Sculpting Property Rights By Private Agreement, Christopher G. Bradley

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Modern business entities, such as LLCs, are increasingly created and deployed to accomplish customized transactions and evade legal restrictions. Rather than acting as traditional business enterprises, entities serve as tools to facilitate complex commercial transactions and surmount limitations presented by existing bodies of law. One limitation constrains the ways that private parties can agree to divide property rights—a doctrinal limitation sometimes referred to as numerus clausus. This Article shows that such limitations on the customizing of property rights by private agreement now can be surmounted by virtue of modern business entity law. After describing the key features of modern …

What Protections Are Available To Graffiti Artists?, Molly Lamovec

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Long-Term Preservation Of Public Art: From Cultural Heritage To The Confederacy, Maliha Ikram

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

New Art For The People: Art Funds & Financial Technology, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Wealthy people have invested in art since time immemorial. But the modem art market emerged only in the late nineteenth century, as private wealth gradually spread to the bourgeoisie. As the art market grew and the most desirable artworks became extremely valuable, individuals and institutions began to form "art funds" to invest in this promising new asset class. In 1904, a group of Parisian art collectors formed La Peau d'Ours, the first private art investment club. Between 1974 and 1980, the British Rail Pension Fund invested £40 million in art. And in the 2000s, many private investment companies created …

The Right To Creative Illegitimacy: Art And The Fallacy Of Proprietary Legitimation, John Baldacchino

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

When we speak of the arts, and more so when one engages with the arts as a practitioner in their various contexts, the questions of legitimacy and legitimation take a very different turn. This spans across a wide horizon, whether it is that of art-making in the studio; of showing in the gallery; of performing in the hall; or of teaching, learning and unlearning in schools, colleges or universities.

To start with, one needs to understand and find a way of differentiating between legitimacy and legitimation. Legitimacy implies a degree of conformity, whether it is with the law, agreed rules, …

What Authorizes The Image? The Visual Economy Of Post-Secular Jurisprudence, Richard Sherwin

Articles & Chapters

In law’s visual economy our commitment to justice grows out of a renewed encounter with an interior libidinal source whose ongoing collective investment binds us to the nomos in which we live. We experience this corporeal bond in paintings, films, and video images on screens large and small. In the ethically inflected aesthetic of post-secular jurisprudence, justice is to law as beauty is to art. As distant as an abstract expressionist canvas, as close as any neighbor, or indeed any screen on which the neighbor becomes real to us. That is where we behold the source and instantiation of law’s …

Intellectual Property In Experience, Madhavi Sunder

Michigan Law Review

In today’s economy, consumers demand experiences. From Star Wars to Harry Potter, fans do not just want to watch or read about their favorite characters— they want to be them. They don the robes of Gryffindor, flick their wands, and drink the butterbeer. The owners of fantasy properties understand this, expanding their offerings from light sabers to the Galaxy’s Edge®, the new Disney Star Wars immersive theme park opening in 2019.Since Star Wars, Congress and the courts have abetted what is now a $262 billion-a-year industry in merchandising, fashioning “merchandising rights” appurtenant to copyrights and trademarks that give fantasy owners …

Equitable Resale Royalties, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A “resale royalty right” or droit de suite(resale right) is a legal right that gives certain artists the right to claim a percentage of the resale price of the artworks they created. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Tunis Model Law on Copyright for Developing Countries provide for an optional resale royalty right. Many countries have created a resale royalty right, although the particulars of the right differ from country to country. But the United States has repeatedly declined to create a federal resale royalty right, and a federal court recently held …

Art & The “Public Trust” In Municipal Bankruptcy, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In 2013, the City of Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy action in United States history, affecting about $20 billion in municipal debt. Unusually, Detroit owned its municipal art museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts (“DIA”) and all of the works of art in the DIA collection, which were potentially worth billions of dollars. Detroit’s creditors wanted Detroit to sell the DIA art in order to satisfy its debts. Key to the confirmation of Detroit’s plan of adjustment was the DIA settlement, under which Detroit agreed to sell the DIA art to the DIA corporation in exchange for $816 million …

If It’S Broke, Fix It: Fixing Fixation, Megan M. Carpenter

Law Faculty Scholarship

The fixation requirement, once an intended instrument for added flexibility in copyrightability, has become an unworkable standard under modern copyright law. The last twenty-five years have witnessed a dramatic expansion in creative media. Developments in both digital media and contemporary art have challenged what it means to be fixed, and cases dealing with these works reveal how inapposite current interpretations of fixation are for these forms of expression. Yet, getting fixation “right” is important, for it is often the juridical threshold over which idea becomes expression. Thus, we must enable fixation to help define the parameters of creative expression while …

Art Resale Royalty Options, Herbert I. Lazerow

Faculty Scholarship

Proposed federal law requires payments from the reseller of art to an artist when her work is resold. They can be conceptualized as a substitute for copyright royalties or for the profits of a joint venture between the artist and the collector. Application is analyzed by art type, especially multiples, place of sale, and nationality or residence of the seller, buyer, intermediary or artist, and by what constitutes a sale in a world of leases, exchanges, gifts, bequests, charitable donations, loans and casualty losses. If the base is gross sales price, is that the amount the seller receives, the amount …

Ex Post Modernism: How The First Amendment Framed Nonrepresentational Art, Sonya G. Bonneau

Sonya G Bonneau

Nonrepresentational art repeatedly surfaces in legal discourse as an example of highly valued First Amendment speech. It is also systematically described in constitutionally valueless terms: nonlinguistic, noncognitive, and apolitical. Why does law talk about nonrepresentational art at all, much less treat it as a constitutional precept? What are the implications for conceptualizing artistic expression as free speech?

This article contends that the source of nonrepresentational art’s presumptive First Amendment value is the same source of its utter lack thereof: modernism. Specifically, a symbolic alliance between abstraction and freedom of expression was forged in the mid-twentieth century, informed by social and …

The Art Of A Loan: “When The Loan Sharks Meet Damien Hirst’S ‘$12-Million Stuffed Shark’”, Valerie Medelyan

Pace Law Review

Part I of this Article introduces the reader to the typical types of loans that banks make, includes an in-depth description of a secured loan, and finishes with a discussion of the due diligence requirements of banks. Part II identifies the unique complexities posed by art when it is used as collateral, comparing and contrasting the banks’ process when approving a loan secured by commonly-used assets versus a loan secured by art. Part III discusses the banks’ growing willingness to approve art-backed loans, and identifies the safeguards built into such deals. Part IV introduces the sub-prime lenders of the art …

Andy Warhol’S Pantry, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article examines Andy Warhol’s use of food and food products as a metaphor for commerce and consumption. It observes that Warhol’s use of images and marks was often inconsistent with copyright and trademark doctrine, and suggests that the fair use doctrine should in-corporate a “Warhol test.”

The Narrowest And Most Obvious Limits: Applying Fair Use To Appropriation Art Economically Using A Royalty System, Brittani Everson

Catholic University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Recognized Stature: Protecting Street Art As Cultural Property, Griffin M. Barnett

Griffin M. Barnett

This Article discusses the current legal regimes in the United States implicated by works of "street art." The Article suggests an amendment to the Visual Artists Rights Act that would protect certain works of street art as "cultural property" - thereby promoting the arts and the preserving important works of art that might otherwise be at the mercy of property owners or others who do not share the interests of artists and the members of communities enhanced by works of street art.

The United States-Canada Free Trade Agreement: Exporting Art By The Numbers, James A.R. Nafziger, Mary P. Rooklidge

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Culture A Justiciable Issue? , Jessica L. Darraby

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Graffiti Museum: A First Amendment Argument For Protecting Uncommissioned Art On Private Property, Margaret L. Mettler

Michigan Law Review

Graffiti has long been a target of municipal legislation that aims to preserve property values, public safety, and aesthetic integrity in the community. Not only are graffitists at risk of criminal prosecution but property owners are subject to civil and criminal penalties for harboring graffiti on their land. Since the 1990s, most U.S. cities have promulgated graffiti abatement ordinances that require private property owners to remove graffiti from their land, often at their own expense. These ordinances define graffiti broadly to include essentially any surface marking applied without advance authorization from the property owner. Meanwhile, graffiti has risen in prominence …

Imagining The Law, Christine Farley

Christine Haight Farley

Law’s relations to art--to its creation, its production, and dissemination, its restriction as well as to commercial and contractual agreements about art works—are as multiform and complex as the category of art itself. Acknowledging that there is no discrete body of law that governs art, the author defines art law as “the survey of legal issues raised by art, artist, and the art world” and surveys four central themes: the law as art, the law of art, the law of creativity, and the collision of art and law. Any legal dispute about art usually evokes a plea for special legal …

The Dialectic Of Obscenity, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Until the 1960s, pornography was obscene, and obscenity prosecutions were relatively common. And until the 1970s, obscenity prosecutions targeted art, as well as pornography. But today, obscenity prosecutions are rare and limited to the most extreme forms of pornography.

So why did obscenity largely disappear? The conventional history of obscenity is doctrinal, holding that the Supreme Court’s redefinition of obscenity in order to protect art inevitably required the protection of pornography as well. In other words, art and literature were the vanguard of pornography.

But the conventional history of obscenity is incomplete. While it accounts for the development of obscenity …