ABSTRACT
Registering their judgment in federal district courts in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Michigan, they pleaded “on information and belief” that museums located in these jurisdictions held antiquities that still belonged to Persia. The 1930s—despite, or perhaps because of, the global Great Depression—were an era of tomb raiders and freebooting adventurers who obtained antiquities by methods both fair and foul. One group of victims is mired in multiple jurisdictions trying to enforce an exorbitant default judgment against the Islamic Republic of Iran by forcing auctions of antiquities collections housed in Harvard University, the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Iran has been designated “a state sponsor of terrorism, and is therefore a ‘terrorist party’ as defined” under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). The FSIA places limits on executing judgment against property owned by foreign sovereigns, while the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act creates exceptions to the limitations imposed by the FSIA.
