ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses three overriding questions. First, what is ‘legal classification’ and why is classification important? Second, how might the various laws that make up heritage law be broadly classified? Third, what does this broad legal classification reveal about the wider goals being pursued by heritage law stakeholders or rightsholders?
In response to these questions, the chapter argues that heritage law is a field of law that does not constitute a core branch of law. Rather, heritage law sources and borrows its norms across a diverse range of the major branches and sub-branches of law. Accordingly, heritage law, not being a core branch of law, can be classified differently in different heritage contexts, depending on the core branch or sub-branch of law that the specific context relates to or is otherwise attracted to. This observation is important because it serves to assist our understanding of the nature, objective and enforcement of heritage law and because it is a critical first step in deciding legal disputes and in sourcing the background norms that regulate cultural heritage.
The chapter further argues that three broad classifications can be applied to heritage law, with each of those classifications revealing key stakeholders seeking to exercise legal rights within the relevant classification and in furtherance of certain specific agendas. When examined from this perspective, it can be seen that classification is also important because it helps to reveal how heritage law effectively allocates or distributes power in relation to heritage through seemingly technical and formalistic legal mechanisms, but that have very deep substantive implications as well.
Finally, the legal classification exercise undertaken in the chapter with respect to heritage law highlights not only the key legal concepts that lie at the heart of this field of law and their weaknesses and limitations, but also suggests the direction the future development of this field of law appears to be taking in response to these observed weaknesses and limitations.
