I am grateful for the responses to the piece. With admirable concision, Professor Beebe has summarized the promise and perils of legal semiotics and the challenges ahead. He is right to note that any “moral, ethical, and political” argument can be broken down with the same tools used to break down legal argument; but one might be tempted to add that having done away with law's aura of authority and diminished the persuasive force of legal arguments may be reward enough for now, at least in the realm of cultural property argument.

Professor Beebe reminds us of the limits of legal semiotics, and in doing so serves as a fitting introduction to Professor Hamilakis's fascinating suggestions, which do indeed throw “the legal and mechanistic narratives on restitution into disarray.” In many ways, his “alternate world view” refines and moves beyond my thinking as I sketched it in Part III. In seeking to confront “the colonial and neocolonial gaze” and “the associated power dynamics,” Professor Hamilakis puts forward a sophisticated framework that has the rare merit of opening new paths for analysis. My bias in favor of restitution was and is rooted in history, and Professor Hamilakis does well to bring us back to the present by reminding us of the materiality of all artifacts: “living, breathing entities.” His general framework only affirms the need to eschew legal arguments and enrich the discourse through complimentary, and hopefully contradictory, contributions to the cultural heritage literature. Professor Hamilakis's approach deserves expounding and developing in more detail, and I hope it spawns much further discussion, interdisciplinary exchange, and cross-pollination.

Indeed, what is most encouraging is that both Professors Beebe and Hamilakis agree on the need to move beyond the language of legal argument. The same cannot be said for Professor Gerstenblith, whose response serves as a very useful dialectical tool to illustrate the persistence of certain standard theoretical responses to legal semiotics, and allows me to come full circle in my re-enactment of legal semiotics by briefly putting forward legal semiotics' response to the orthodox critique. Professor Gerstenblith's heart is in the right place, but in her rush to speak out in favor of the preservation of cultural property, she appropriates the litigator's technique of portraying the law as clearly and inarguably dictating the outcome she desires. In so doing, she opens the door for her opponents to use the very same litigator's tactics, setting the stage for the predictable and dispiriting legal back and forth my article attempts to leave behind.

The law of cultural property is settled, she insists. One might be tempted to respond by asking her why the Greeks and the British haven't just sat down, “applied the law” and gone on with their lives. How would an African minister of culture or Italian archaeologist react to Professor Gerstenblith stating that the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken, that statutes and treaties have been enacted by the United States, and that one only need go out and apply them? There are many people in the world who do not believe that U.S. legislative and judicial instances are the last word, people who live in other countries with their own laws and courts, and who may find her argument that law is “settled” just another example of provincialism masquerading as universality. Reasonable people argue about the law of cultural property all the time. I emphasize this point throughout article but especially in the long discussion on the legal culture of cultural property. I note that the absence of final authority and settled law because of the transnational character of most disputes; the wide range of permitted arguers (archaeologists, anthropologists, curators, and diplomats, not just men and women admitted to a U.S. state bar); and the lack of an established procedural apparatus, taken together leave a wide open space for improvisational arrangements of argument-bites. In many ways, cultural property is a prototypical example of a conflict- and gap-filled area of the law.

The examples of settled law cited by Professor Gerstenblith are cases and statutes governing stolen cultural property. Indeed, the law tells us that a vase stolen from the Baghdad museum in 2003 that turns up in the hands of a Swiss dealer should be returned. Frankly, this is neither interesting nor helpful. Of course there are examples of easily applicable laws within the cultural property umbrella; but the real underlying issue—what to do with the thousands of antiquities in Western museums that were taken over the centuries and that formerly or still-colonized or subjugated groups are claiming—has no clear answer in the law, nor could it (for the reasons set forth in the article).

When lawyers practice, they seek to obtain a desired outcome by playing by the rules of the game. It is our task as scholars to question the assumptions and processes underlying the game. I am fully aware that day-to-day legal practice overwhelmingly occurs under fixed laws with easily determinable outcomes; but even in a world where cultural property law were as settled as Professor Gerstenblith claims (whatever that would look like), nothing would preclude the kind of critique deployed in my article. First, as a general matter, there is no such thing as a completely settled area of law, because any litigators worth their salt can find gaps and ambiguities within the law on which to built arguments. Second, legal semiotics make no claims as to the predictability of judicial outcomes: judges consistently acting in bad faith can lead to a kind of settled law, but that certainly shouldn't preclude critique. Third, 30 years of critical legal studies have thoroughly debunked the notion that judges just apply the law; I can do no more in this limited space than refer the reader to the canonical critical theory contributions for a full explanation why and how judges apply their policy preferences (although, as I noted, many nonlawyers suspected that all along). I would add that Professor Beebe's response succinctly summarizes the problem that Professor Gerstenblith ignores: The “dialectical nature of maxims and countermaxims” illustrates “a disturbing vision of a discourse that functions by its nature not so much to generate meaning and normative force as to suppress them, all so that the status quo remains undisturbed.” Finally, in her bizarre attempt to equate belief in unsettled law with apology for the law's transgressors (convicted antiquities dealers, no less), Professor Gerstenblith unwittingly stumbles on the interesting question (with which legal semiotics has been grappling): whether legal semiotics leads to cynicism or nihilism, a rather “standard criticism” that Professor Beebe thoughtfully evokes in his response and I address at the beginning of Part III of my piece.

As a side note, Professor Gerstenblith has misread my discussion on nesting. Whether an innocent owner defense exists and whether to permit a good faith exception to the defense are both questions of law, not fact.

Finally, in Professor Shapiro's comment, he argues that “argument has moved from legal to moral and is now, for want of a better description, contextual.” That is certainly an accurate description of the general trend, although I would point to Professor Gerstenblith's response to illustrate that the legal has a way of persisting despite efforts to transcend it. Moreover, I am not sure that the debate over context is not just another set of policy arguments to be co-opted and internalized by the legal discourse. Absorption into law is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, so long as the arguments are judged for themselves. The danger, and the reason to be vigilant, arises when arguments become force of law, taking on the additional (and unwarranted) persuasiveness and authority that come with being the law. There is nothing wrong with law so long as it is recognized for what it is.

This brings me to Professor Shapiro's thoughtful critique of Part III of the article. He writes that “saying that wrongfully taken objects should be returned is … bald assertion” and that “choosing sides … as in discussions of religion and politics, will likely lead nowhere.” I partly share his skepticism, which is why I whole-heartedly support the efforts of those who seek new paradigms to build on (e.g., Professor Hamilakis's materiality of artifacts). But I also believe that, once we strip legal arguments of their inherent persuasive value and move beyond the game of lawyers endlessly parroting each other's argument-bites, we can set the stage for productive exchanges—including exchanges of “bald assertions”—that lead to acceptable solutions beyond the “old dichotomies.” Professor Shapiro is right that “it is the process that counts,” and as Professors Beebe, Hamilakis, and Shapiro show, the process ahead is promising indeed.

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