ABSTRACT
The topics that might be addressed in a survey of law and social science literature pertaining to cultural property have multiplied exponentially in the past decade. In international law, it was once possible to consider cultural property and cultural heritage as two discrete categories, but even then, commentators bemoaned the fact that the terms in different languages they referred to were seldom translations of the same concepts. Biens culturrels, beni culturali, bienes culturales, Kulturgut, and bens culturais, for example, do not have the same legal meanings (Frigo 2004, p. 370). Such interpretive difficulties now seem provincial. In any case, these promise only to proliferate as these categories expand, their distinction implodes, and their subject matter and fields of reference proliferate.
