James F. Fitzpatrick

James F. Fitzpatrick Adjunct Professor of Law; Senior Partner, Arnold & Porter LLP

"Professor Fitzpatrick is a senior partner at Arnold & Porter. He has been involved in issues of international movement of cultural properties since the early 1970s. He has represented the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental & Primitive Art for thirty years in connection with legislative and executive branch efforts to implement the 1970 UNESCO Convention on cultural properties. In that connection he appeared in a variety of Congressional hearings leading to the passage in 1983 of the Cultural Property Implementation Act, which is the essential U.S. policy statement relating to foreign cultural properties. That law set up the Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC) which has the responsibility for evaluating requests from foreign nations to bar the import of specific cultural properties in jeopardy from pillage. He has made numerous appearances before CPAC in connection with proposals for U.S. embargoes of foreign cultural properties. In addition Professor Fitzpatrick has been involved in a number of judicial proceedings in the U.S. in which claims of foreign nations have been advanced for the return of cultural properties, including Peru v. Johnson and Steinhardt v. U.S.. Professor Fitzpatrick has counseled the U.S. arts community in its opposition to UNIDROIT and has authored a white paper to the State Department stating why the U.S. should not accept its terms. He has also worked with members of Congress in efforts to reform CPAC procedures to conform to Congress' initial policy directives. He is a member of the board of the Phillips Collection, the Shakespeare Theatre and the Center for Arts and Culture, all in Washington, D.C. He is the Chairman of the British American Arts Association and is a board member of Site Sante Fe. He formerly was president of the Washington Project for the Arts. He is Chair of Global Rights, an international human rights organization."


 * Advisory Board, Center for Constitutional Democracy in Plural Societies