Art Crime and the Law

The lecture/seminar provides the students with knowledge of:

• the main contemporary criminological and legal debates surrounding art and antiquities crime;
• key discussions and debates surrounding emerging criminological issues in relation to globalization and transnational crime;
• how legal positions are forced to adapt to deal with developing types of international crime; 
• some of the basic forensic technologies associated with art and provenance fraud/forgery detection;
• how comparative and interdisciplinary approaches are used to combat complex criminological problems.

The seminar provides the students with the following skills:

• the ability to synthesize items of knowledge from different schools and disciplines of enquiry;
• the capacity to discuss criminological and legal isses within transnational and international contexts;
• the capability to think both creatively and constructively in evaluating and critiquing contemporary criminological and legal theory;
• the intellectual flexibility to consider the regulatory challenges posed by international art and antiquities crime;
• the capability to analyse popular discourses, texts, and visual material realted to the field of art crime.

The seminar provides the students with the following competences:

• the ability to independently identify and address emerging legal issues within the field of contemporary art crime;
• the ability to apply comparative approaches to complex problems (e.g. by researching responses developed in other jurisdictions or by drawing analogies to responses to other criminological or legal problems);
• the capability to critically address rapidly changing global realities from a criminological and legal perspective;
• the capacity to independently undertake basic analysis of forensic and technological issues relating to art fraud/forgery;
• the capacity to conduct sustained individual research into a self-identified topic and to develop and defend a substantive hypothetical or critical position;
• the ability to draw upon research from a range of disciplines in order to better formulate specific criminological or legal research questions, and to derive improved regulatory results.