ABSTRACT
LOOKING BACK AT 2005, ownership continues to be the issue at the forefront of cultural property law. Whether the facts involve undertakings affecting sacred sites located on public lands, historic-preservation zoning affecting religious structures, the protection of burials on private lands, repatriation of property long held in museum or government collections, or the retrieval of shipwrecks and artifacts in the marine environment, often the threshold issue is whether a person or group has legally suffi cient rights to confer on them the standing of a protected party or eligible claimant. Consequently, when Holocaust survivors and their heirs, Native American and African American individuals and communities, or “source nations” assert claims against collectors, museums, and governments for items that were allowed to change hands in the marketplace because their earlier owners suffered disenfranchisement or the disparate, adverse impacts of past government undertakings, or were separated from their cultural items through deportation or expropriation following conquest, it is ownership that frequently becomes fundamental to resolution of the matter. In addition, ownership plays a role in land management decisions and market transactions.
