Legal Studies Guest Speaker: Mark Drumbl

The destruction of cultural property is an international war crime, and a push has arisen to make it a crime against humanity. Cultural property destruction is also often central to transitional justice and liberation efforts. These dualities tend to be reconciled by aesthetic judgment on what is ‘ugly’ cultural property, namely, cultural property linked to oppressors, abusers, and tyrants. It is only cultural property worthy of protection whose destruction is considered criminal. In many jurisdictions – the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and throughout Central and Eastern Europe – ‘ugly’ cultural property is toppled, removed from public spaces, sequestered, destroyed, and renamed. These include Confederate monuments, statuary of settler colonialism, Nazi relics, etc. Yet this is not the only way to interface with ‘ugly’ cultural property. Italy offers a different approach. This is an approach of nonchalant integration to Mussolini-era monuments and iconography. Through a visual ethnography, this talk phenomenologically narrates this approach through the eyes of one outsider.

Speaker Bio:

Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and Director, the Transnational Law Institute, at Washington and Lee University. He has held visiting appointments and has taught at law schools worldwide, including Queen’s University Belfast, Oxford University (University College), Université de Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), Free University of Amsterdam, University of Melbourne, Masaryk University (Czechia), and John Cabot University in Rome. His work has been relied upon by national and international courts; he has served as a defense lawyer in Rwandan genocide trials; co-authored an amicus brief to the International Criminal Court in the Ongwen case; and has been an expert in litigation including on international terrorism, with the UN in matters involving child soldiers, and with the UN Human Rights Council in the drafting of a global convention to criminalize racist hate speech. His books include Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (Cambridge 2007), Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford 2012), and Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (Oxford 2024, with Barbora Holá); and co-edited volumes Research Handbook of Child Soldiers (Elgar 2019, with Jastine Barrett), Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions (Brill 2024, with Caroline Fournet), Children and Violence (Routledge 2024, with Christelle Molima and Mohamed Kamara et al), and The Character of International Law (Bloomsbury, 2025, with Emma Breeze and Gerry Simpson).