I am proud to announce the publication in the Chapman Law Review of my article: “Turnabout is Foul Play: Sovereign Immunity and Cultural Property Claims”. As the article explains, the Roberts Court has contorted beyond...more
Seven bipartisan sponsors introduced the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025 on May 22, 2025, as Senate Bill 1884. The bill would extend provisions of the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act (HEAR Act) of 2016...more
In February, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) announced that it would withdraw its lawsuit against the Manhattan District Attorney (DANY) for declaratory judgment that the museum was the rightful owner of a Greco-Roman...more
I was proud to advise the Allentown Art Museum, which announced today that it has reached an agreement with the heirs of Henry and Hertha Bromberg concerning Portrait of George, Duke of Saxony by Lucas Cranach the Elder and...more
I attended today’s press conference at District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr.’s office in Manhattan at which a drawing by Egon Schiele, Seated Nude Woman, Front View, was transferred to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum. I represent...more
I was honored to be among the speakers this week at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on March 5, 2024. Convened by the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the U.S. State Department, the event announced the...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled on January 9, 2024 that the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation in Madrid is the owner of Rue Saint–Honoré, après-midi, effect de pluie (1892) by Camille Pissarro, a...more
(Germany’s highest court issued a much-anticipated ruling on a challenge by a collector to the listing of his painting in the so-called Lost Art database in Magdeburg, Germany. The Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) ruled that the...more
The artworks stolen by the Nazis are the last prisoners of World War II. – Ronald Lauder, Woman in Gold Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was a wealthy sugar magnate in Vienna, Austria where his six Gustav Klimt paintings were housed....more
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed into law a new requirement requiring museums to indicate publicly any object in their collection that was displaced by the Nazis as part of what Congress has rightly called the...more
Auguring a flood of opinions in the remaining weeks of the term, the Supreme Court decided five cases today. Some of them offer support for the media/popular equation of a political party background with jurisprudential...more
On April 21, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Cassirer et al. v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation, No. 20-1566, holding that federal courts hearing state-law claims under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act...more
Boechler, P.C. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, No. 20-1472: This case involves the application of “equitable tolling” in tax “collection due process” cases. This case arose after the IRS sustained a proposed levy on the...more
A painting by Camille Pissarro hangs in a Spanish museum that the Nazis stole from a Jewish family in 1939. For fifteen years the parties have litigated who the rightful owner is: the museum or the family. The case may well...more
Today I am pleased to announce that I have filed a brief in the Supreme Court of the United States as counsel of record for amicus curiae Mark B. Feldman, former U.S. Department of State Acting Legal Adviser. We filed the...more
We were privileged to file today a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of our client, art dealer Alexander Khochinsky. The petition asks the Court for reinstatement of a lawsuit...more
Last week, on behalf of our client Alexander Khochinsky, an art dealer, we filed a petition to rehear en banc the June 18, 2021 decision by a three-judge panel affirming the dismissal of the lawsuit against Poland for lack of...more
Last month, in Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp, 141 S. Ct. 703 (2021), the United States Supreme Court revisited and narrowed the scope of the expropriation exception to sovereign immunity set forth in the Foreign...more
In connection with the late-2020 amendment to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) to include “dealers in antiquities” as a result of its inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Treasury Department’s Financial...more
The Situation: On July 10, 2018, the D.C. Circuit held that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act's ("FSIA") expropriation exception to sovereign immunity extended to a sovereign's taking of its own nationals' property in an...more
On February 3, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its anticipated decision in Germany v. Philipp, a case implicating the exception to foreign sovereign immunity for claims arising out of “property taken in violation of...more
On February 3, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp, No. 19–351, holding that the expropriation exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) does not apply to a domestic...more
(WASHINGTON-October 22, 2020) The heirs to the Jewish art dealers who were forced to sell the medieval devotional art collection known as the Welfenschatz (in English, the Guelph Treasure) to agents of Hermann Goering in 1935...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday affirmed the 2019 judgment that allowed the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Museum in Madrid to retain Camille Pissarro’s Rue St. Honoré, après-midi, effet de pluie (Rue...more
(WASHINGTON-July 2, 2020) The United States Supreme Court today agreed to hear the appeal by Germany and the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SPK) seeking to dismiss the restitution claim by the heirs to the so-called...more