CJIL Online 3.2
Summer
2024

Online
Comment
CJIL Online 3.2
The Cathedral of Looted Goods: Enforcing Cultural Property Repatriation with Calabresi and Melamed’s Entitlement Protection Rules
Jennifer Kuo

I am endlessly grateful for the staff of the Chicago Journal of International Law, my faculty advisor Professor Lee Fennell, and my family and friends for their continued support, assistance, and guidance throughout the process of writing this Comment.

Normatively, most nations agree that holding onto artifacts belonging to other peoples is both morally and legally unconscionable, but practically, there has been no enforcement scheme under international law for artifacts to finally return home. Calabresi and Melamed’s property, liability, and inalienability rules could be justified and applied to repatriation disputes through consideration of a mixture of economic efficiency, distributive, and justice motivations. Using this framework to create a model of variable protection of international law would create a comprehensive enforcement scheme that resolves the fundamental enforcement problem that international law faces in facilitating repatriation.