Member Article

While in power, the Nazis ruthlessly engineered the theft of hundreds of thousands of artworks and other cultural property from their victims.[1] During and after World War II, a significant number of these pieces made their way to museums, galleries and private collections in the U.S. This led to civil litigation in U.S. courts when the Nazis' victims and their heirs sought the restitution of these artworks. In 2016, Congress enacted the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act, or HEAR, Act, which extended the statute of limitations for Nazi era — 1933-1945 — restitution claims and sought to prioritize resolution of those claims "in a just and fair manner," a standard that has generally been understood to disfavor the resolution of claims on procedural grounds, such as statutes of limitations.[2] Since the passage of the HEAR Act, courts, commentators and litigants have struggled to delineate the extent to which time-based arguments remain relevant — as both a legal and an ethical matter — to resolving Nazi-era restitution claims.[3] A June decision in Bennigson v. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation[4] in the Supreme Court of the State of New York provides valuable clarity on this issue, illustrating how a just and fair resolution under the HEAR Act may sometimes require dismissal of a claim where the claimants waited too long to assert their claim.

To read Harry Sandick's, John Sare's, and James Mayer's article in Law360, please click here.