United States v. Pre-Columbian Artifacts and the Republic of Guatemala: Expansion of National Stolen Property Act in its Application to Illegally Exported Cultural Property

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One of the major issues confronting U. S. courts in international cultural property cases is the significance of foreign export restriction violations. This is a particularly sensitive issue for museums in art purchasing nations since aggressive support of the view that export restriction violation is theft could result in the return of much of a museum's collection. In fact, Thomas Hoving, past director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art stated, “almost every antiquity that has arrived in America in the past ten to twenty years has broken the laws of the country from which it came.”