There is an almost universal belief that places and objects of cultural significance should be protected. The crucial caveat is that no one completely agrees what that entails. This is the tension at the heart of Lorenzo Casini’s Advanced Introduction to Cultural Heritage Law, which endeavors to explain both the competing philosophical underpinnings of cultural heritage preservation as a field, and the international legal order that has developed around it. Casini speaks with the authority of a scholar who is well-versed in the intellectual traditions of this discipline. That familiarity allows him to succinctly (but thoughtfully) spell out working definitions of cultural heritage and cultural property in the book’s opening pages. That exercise lends important credibility and context to a second chapter devoted to the six inherent conceptual dichotomies that any such definitions must navigate. Each of these thorny juxtapositions has critical implications for law and policy, setting the stage for Casini’s final sweeping overview of international cultural heritage law.

Any legal undertaking must start with a controlled vocabulary, and defining one’s terms is doubly important with concepts as amorphous as these. Drawing on definitions in existing law and scholarship, Casini conceptualizes “cultural heritage” as encompassing a range of cultural objects and practices, including 1) tangible cultural objects like art, archaeological finds, or buildings; 2) culturally significant landscapes such as battlefields or natural settings with cultural resonance for a specific group; and 3) “intangible” cultural activities or bodies of knowledge that are generally not reduced to physical form. If this seems like an expansive definition, it is because it has been gradually widened beyond the confines of the narrower phrase “cultural property” (which historically corresponded roughly with the tangible aspects of “cultural heritage,” referenced above). Casini is careful to explain that while the term “cultural property” continues to be used in international legal instruments to describe objects of archaeological, ethnographic, or historical significance, this practice is potentially Eurocentric and limiting. The concern, in Casini’s recounting, is that this ties cultural items to a distinctly Western idea of property (wherein objects of cultural importance are commodities that can be privately owned) while also equating “culture” with markers of a specific European idea of “civilization.”

Casini uses the second chapter to spell out the balance of interests built into these definitions and, by extension, the field of historic preservation more generally. Casini terms these the “six dilemmas.” The first dilemma concerns whether cultural heritage should be treated as public or private property. Stated differently, how should one mediate the interests of governments (tasked with defending a State’s cultural resources) and individual citizens (seeking protection of private property rights)? Casini’s second dilemma is the choice between preservation and “valorization,” or the idea that States must decide whether to prioritize preserving cultural resources or promoting them to the public. The latter approach democratizes access and often raises capital but may put the resources at risk. Economic considerations are similarly central to the third dilemma, retention versus circulation, which describes whether a State opts to restrict the movement of its cultural heritage beyond its borders. The next two dilemmas ask how any of this calculus changes when the definition of cultural heritage is expanded to encompass intangible heritage (the fourth dilemma) or natural landscapes (the fifth dilemma). Finally, Casini addresses whether cultural objects should be considered exclusively the heritage of a single extant political entity, or whether they can be so transcendently import to the human experience that they become part of a shared world heritage. The question has important implications for each of the other dilemmas, as identifying who can claim association with certain cultural heritage (or relatedly, who has the mandate to manage it) is among the most fraught parts of designing a regulatory regime.

While it might seem odd to spend more than 50% of a legal text’s page count on definitional issues rather than substantive law, this background is vital for contextualizing the broad overview of the current international legal order outlined in the final chapters. Casini begins by briefly sketching a deep historical lineage for the various measures protecting cultural property, gesturing first to spiritual predecessors like edicts from 15th- and 16th-century Europe and the coining of “cultural property” as a legal term of art in the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. The text then zeros in on the major late 20th-century efforts to systematize cultural property protections, occasioned primarily by two prominent UNESCO conventions in the early 1970s. As Casini lays out, the system created by these treaties and international conventions serves three primary purposes: 1) creating a regulatory framework for signatory States through the provision of draft treaties, guidelines, and recommendations; 2) providing organizational infrastructure through which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and intrastate agencies can collaborate; and 3) providing mechanisms for interaction between signatory State governments. Interstate cooperation is particularly critical for coordinating the trade and (increasing) repatriation of cultural objects to the country of origin, though Casini notes that the current framework is widely considered ineffective. One relatively unique aspect of this text is that it also includes a discussion of bottom-up regulations imposed by private cultural heritage actors (such as ICOM and the Bizot group), which produce their own guidelines and norms. Even books dedicated to this topic rarely include details on these systems. The work concludes with a few modest observations about recent developments.

While this text is clearly well-researched and cogently constructed, it is not without shortcomings. As an initial matter, the potential audience for this work is somewhat limited. It efficiently outlines the key considerations and legal instruments in this field, but it is neither basic enough to be considered “introductory” nor detailed enough to be comprehensive. This is more an issue with the format of Elgar’s Advanced Introductions series in general than a complaint about this book in particular, but that tension does manifest negatively in the prose. The language often becomes cluttered with citations and allusions to other works that Casini apparently doesn’t have the space to fully explain or analyze. Relatedly, the author’s preferred approach to distilling complicated treaties and ideas to their essential elements is to structure his passages as a series of numbered lists. This compositional crutch quickly becomes exhausting to parse. In one especially egregious example from the first chapter, a single paragraph contains no less than three separate numbered lists, each consisting of four or five entries. Finally, while Casini does draw occasional parallels to the legal regimes of specific non-Western countries (such as Japan and China), the examples discussed are heavily European, and Italian specifically. While it is beneficial to bring the work of continental European scholars to the attention of an English-speaking audience, it represents a missed opportunity to paint a more global picture of the field.

All of that said, I would still recommend that most legal academic libraries consider purchasing this text. It is not a work for a general audience (or even most members of an academic community), but it concisely summarizes a complicated area of law. Doctrinal faculty looking for short excerpts to assign as student readings or librarians seeking leads for a reference question would undoubtedly find great value here. Most importantly, the book’s modest price makes it a tremendous value.