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Introduction[1]   Why have Palestinian Bedouin youth in the Jerusalem periphery disappeared? This has been a consistent question in the minds of researchers working with Al-Quds University Human Rights Clinic (AQHRC). The AQHRC has been working with Palestinian Bedouin communities in the southeast Jerusalem periphery since 2014. These communities are among the most vulnerable communities to Israeli settler colonialism in all of its components; land expropriation, displacement, and imposition of an apartheid system, as will be demonstrated shortly. Over the past ten years, despite making concerted and consistent engagement with these communities, AQHRC has failed in engaging young men in the vast majority of activities, including research, advocacy, and awareness-raising workshops, to name a few.   This observation was corroborated while interviewing a 37-year-old Bedouin man in a Bedouin community near Jerusalem. The field research team of AQHRC asked him about the whereabouts of young Bedouin men, and his response was: ‘we rarely see them as well…if it is a wedding, or a social event you will see 300 young men but otherwise you will barely see one of them, it is like they have just ‘disappeared’ as if they rode a donkey or a car and went deep into the desert’.[2] This statement on its own gave rise to several other questions. Why would the Bedouin young men appear in weddings or social events and not in political activities? Why are they absent from the public sphere and the political arena of their communities despite the imminent threat of eviction and demolition of their homes by the Israeli authorities? How can this alternating surfacing of young men be explained?   Suppression of resistance, activism, and mobilisation are intrinsic components of settler colonialism. Within this framework, Israeli occupation has constructed a sophisticated system of suppression through the adoption of a series of vital laws and policies. These include Military Order 101 and the British Defence (Emergency) Regulations in Mandatory Palestine, which restricted freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and political participation. All of these will be explored thoroughly later. Apart from these laws, the risk of revocation of civil status as a concrete part of settler colonialism, coupled with the risk of deprivation of opportunities and access to livelihood, has given rise to self-censorship and refrain from any form of participation in activism and resistance. This is particularly relevant among the most vulnerable Palestinians, whose livelihoods completely depend on the Israeli economy.   Israeli measures intended to instil domination of one racial group over another has over time given rise to the absenteeism of key social groups from political arena and wider Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. This system of hegemony and domination has been the subject of several recent analyses by Israeli and international human rights organisations, who have all concluded that Israel practices a system of apartheid against Palestinians that seeks to perpetuate the domination of one racial group over another.[3]   A key pillar of this system of apartheid is the fragmentation of Palestinians, which classifies Palestinians by civil status and confers a hierarchy of privileges and rights accordingly. This system of classification is designated by area of residency. To demonstrate by way of example, Palestinians inside Israel enjoy the status of citizenship, which differs from nationality, as the former confers individual rights, while the latter confers collective national rights.[4] In contrast, Palestinians in Jerusalem enjoy the status of ‘permanent’ residents, which confers residency, employment, and other social rights. However, this status is fragile, and unlike its connotation can be easily revoked, on grounds including but not limited to the ‘centre of life’ criterion and as a punitive measure.[5] Further down the ladder of privileges are Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are stateless and reside under a system of military occupation, and last are refugees whose right of return is unrecognised by Israel.[6]

My Story   Ten years old and wishing I was dead. Sitting on my bed, staring at my hand—wondering whether I was invisible or not. I never want another child to feel invisible, worthless, and so terrorised that they can’t swallow. So filled with fear that their very breath feels choked and smothered. Let me take you on a journey back 50 years, to my childhood.   My mum had run away from her Mafia boyfriend, a Greek man who was already married. Upon hearing my mum was pregnant, he took out a gun and put it to her stomach, saying: ‘Get rid of the baby or I will kill you both’. There was no fairy-tale ending, as my mum had hoped, of him leaving his wife, marriage, and having a baby together. There was only the stark reality of running in fear—homeless, with no money and no work. My mum ended up living in a homeless shelter in the UK, traumatised and addicted to alcohol. I was born two months early. As my mum couldn’t look after me, I went to live with an aunt. In the meantime, my mum met a smooth-talking man in a pub who groomed her, said he loved her and asked her to marry him. She did marry him, and when I was two she took me back and I lived with them.   My stepdad was evil; he was an alcoholic and a psychopath. He had severe mental illness and hated me with every fibre of his being. He was obsessively jealous and saw me as a part of the man who my mum first loved. Life as a child was hell on earth. My stepdad was drunk and aggressive daily and beat my mum most weeks. I saw her kicked, punched, stabbed, screamed at, and constantly verbally and emotionally abused. My stepdad would chase her down our street with a knife and punch her in front of the neighbours; yet not one person stepped in to help. The attitude was to turn a blind eye and not interfere with the business of others.   One night I witnessed my mum being kicked in the stomach and strangled and I watched in fear as an ambulance took her unconscious, battered body to hospital. The neighbours had phoned the police when they heard the screams—the first time the neighbours had actually helped. My stepdad was arrested, but the next morning he got let off and came home. My stepdad told me my mum was dead, and when I started to cry, he took out a knife and said he would cut me in pieces and put me in the freezer. Three days later my mum walked in the door, bruised and with a hoarse voice. I ran to her immediately—all I wanted was to be hugged and comforted. I had just endured three days of hell thinking she was dead. Instead she pushed me away and said, ‘We don’t talk about it’.   My stepdad was in a gang of men, a gang that included both a doctor and a policeman. They would come to the house and buy me with money or sometimes give my stepdad a bottle of whiskey. I cannot look at a bottle of whiskey without being triggered by the trauma of what happened to me. I often had the thought: ‘I am only worth the value of a bottle of whiskey’. The gang would abuse and rape me. Sometimes I would be taken in a car to places where other men and children were located and be abused there, but it is all a blur for me now—they gave me meds to keep me quiet.

On Monday 15 April, a fire broke out in the Notre-Dame de Paris. Believers and tourists were invited to leave the cathedral immediately. A race against time was launched which would last more than fifteen hours, defying all human bravery to save the Notre-Dame. Thousands of people gathered around the cathedral this evening to reflect, pray, and witness this catastrophe which none had thought possible to an eight-century old lady that had accompanied people in their joys and sorrows and had survived wars, plagues, revolutions, and occupations. The emotion was felt worldwide and donations for the reconstruction arrived quickly. The fire destroyed the spire, the timber roof structure, and part of the vault, at the level of the transept crossing. Three years later, the investigation to find the cause of this fire is still ongoing. This article does not claim to be an exhaustive account of the issues associated with the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, nor does it claim definitive answers to an ongoing investigation. It rather seeks to put forward a scientific hypothesis on the causes of this fire, not only for the pure satisfaction of knowledge, but also in the hope to raise awareness about the widespread but relatively unknown phenomenon of pyrolysis during works on monuments.[1] It is crucial that architects and companies working on listed buildings are aware of the phenomenon of pyrolysis so that they can adapt their working protocols, be more vigilant, and request more efficient fire detection instruments to avoid future similar disasters. In recent years, other major French monuments undergoing restoration works had been destroyed without the causes being identified: the seventeenth-century Hôtel Lambert in the centre of Paris in 2013 and the flamboyant gothic townhall of La Rochelle in 2013 are just two examples. In the 1990s, a fire outbreak was discovered just in time at the Beauvais Cathedral the day following some hot-spot work using a blowtorch. It is worth reminding the reader that the vast majority of fires happening during work are caused by hot-spot works.[2] The phenomenon of pyrolysis and, more generally, of slow combustion are still little known to those working on historic monuments, whether they are architects or craftsmen. The case of Notre-Dame de Paris deserves to be studied in greater depth because this hypothesis remains the most likely, given the conditions that existed during the restoration of the spire in the days preceding the fire. The current investigation has only shown that the fire started at the foot of the spire (fig. 1). Samples of charred wood have made it possible to locate the fire’s starting point in the area of ‘the wall plate of the choir at the south-east corner of the transept crossing’ (fig. 2).[3] Fig 1. Flèche centrale de N-D de Paris ©Ville de Paris / Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP) The spire, built by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc at the transept crossing, was embellished with sixteen statues, that of the twelve Apostles in the higher parts and the symbols of the four Evangelists at the bottom. Fig 2. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1854-1868) The statues rested on wooden posts directly connected to the roof timber structure. At the South-East of the crossing, the lowest post supported the Eagle of St John the Evangelist. It was at its base that the fire broke out on 15 April 2019.

In law schools as well as political science and history classes, students are generally taught that when the Supreme Court decides a constitutional issue it delivers the final word unless the Court changes its position. That is the prominent theory. In 1953, Justice Robert Jackson promoted the doctrine of judicial finality by making a statement that is often cited: ‘We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final’.[1] Perhaps a clever and witty turn of phrase but it advances a claim unsupported by facts. What has occurred from 1789 to the present time is not judicial finality but an ongoing dialogue among all three branches of the national government, the states, scholars, and the general public. On occasion, members of the Supreme Court will acknowledge that errors and misconceptions can occur in the judicial process. Chief Justice William Rehnquist spoke bluntly in 1993: ‘It is an unalterable fact that our judicial system, like the human beings who administer it, is fallible’.[2] The person who should have understood that point is Robert Jackson. In 1940 the Court upheld a compulsory flag-salute with a strong majority of 8 to 1.[3] The final word? No. The decision was subject to such criticism from the public and scholars that three Justices in the majority (Hugo Black, William Douglas. and Frank Murphy) announced two years later that the decision was wrongly decided.[4] That reduced the majority to 5-4. Two of the Justices in the 8-1 majority retired and their replacements joined the four Justices to produce a 6-3 decision in 1943 reversing the 1940 decision.[5] Who wrote the majority opinion in 1943? It was Robert Jackson. Early Precedents The claim of judicial finality appears in a unanimous decision by Chief Justice John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), which held that Congress possessed an implied power to create a national bank. He said if the case had to be decided ‘by this tribunal alone can the decision be made’. On the Supreme Court ‘has the constitution of our country devolved this important duty’.[6] He concluded that the statute to create the Bank of the United States ‘is a law made in pursuance of the constitution, and is a part of the supreme law of the land’.[7] The fact that Congress created the Bank and the Supreme Court upheld it did not prevent the elected branches from reaching a different conclusion a few decades later. On 10 July 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to restore the U.S. Bank. While admitting that the bill had some positive features and had gained support from the Supreme Court, he noted the mixed history of the Bank: Congress favoring it in 1791, voting against it in 1811 and 1815, but supporting it in 1816.[8] As to the decision in McCulloch , he denied that the Court’s ruling, even if it ‘covered the whole ground of this act’, ought ‘to control the coordinate authorities of this government’. Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court ‘must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution’. A public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution ‘swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others’. The opinion of judges ‘has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both’.[9]

I. Introduction Issues of priority are at the centre of English land law. Where a plot of land in which a third party has an interest is transferred from one party to another, a conflict arises between this third party and the transferee: whose interest has priority? If push comes to shove, can the transferee prevent the third-party interest holder from exercising her right, or is the third-party interest-holder entitled to enjoy her interest in the face of the transferee’s objections? The Land Registration Act (‘LRA’) 2002 does much to answer this question. Under section 29, pre-existing unregistered interests are postponed to the interests of a registered disponee taking for valuable consideration. As a result, any such unenforceable interests are rendered prima facie unenforceable against a purchaser. However, section 29 only has this effect where the priority of the interest in question is not ‘protected’. Interests falling under any of the paragraphs of schedule 3 LRA 2002 are within this special category of ‘protected’ interests.[1] This article is concerned with paragraph 2 of schedule 3, which serves the important function of safeguarding interests ‘belonging at the time of the disposition to a person in actual occupation’[2] and ‘whose occupation would not have been obvious on a reasonably careful inspection of the land at the time of the disposition’.[3] Paragraph 1 is limited to leaseholds and paragraph 3 is limited to easements and profits à prendre . By contrast, paragraph 2 is not constrained in its application to any particular interests. This makes paragraph 2 potentially far-reaching in its effects and a powerful defence against the postponement mechanism in section 29. However, the interpretation of schedule 3 paragraph 2 has proved a significant headache for the courts. First, disagreement has emerged regarding precisely when the disposed land must be occupied.[4] Second, there has been debate as to which factors might be relevant when deciding whether a person is in actual occupation. The relevance courts should accord to a person’s ‘intentions and wishes’ has remained particularly ambiguous in this regard.[5] Third, in the context of the rectification and alteration provisions in the LRA 2002, the question has arisen whether a ‘right to rectify’ the register might amount to an overriding interest under schedule 3 paragraph 2.[6] Behind these controversies, however, the question whether the protection afforded by paragraph 2 is coextensive with actual occupation seems to have been largely forgotten. This question did receive some notable attention under the LRA 1925. Applying section 70(1)(g) LRA 1925—the precursor to schedule 3 paragraph 2 in the LRA 2002—the decisions in Ashburn Anstalt v Arnold [7] and Ferrishurst v Wallcite [8] came to opposite conclusions regarding whether occupation of part of the land could protect an interest in the whole. The LRA 2002 seems to preclude this possibility by providing that an interest is only overriding ‘so far as relating to land … in actual occupation’.[9] However, schedule 3 paragraph 2 is not free from ambiguity in this respect. In particular, the change in the wording from section 70(1)(g) LRA 1925 raises the question whether the words ‘relating to’ enable the protection afforded by paragraph 2(1) to extend beyond the land actually occupied. I will attempt to answer this forgotten question. First, I will outline in brief the pre-LRA 2002 disagreement regarding the scope of the protection afforded by actual occupation. Second, I will analyse the changes implemented by the LRA 2002. I will demonstrate that the vexed question is whether ‘relating to land … in actual occupation’ should be interpreted narrowly or broadly. Under the narrow interpretation, only an interest in land which is actually occupied by the interest-holder would be protected against postponement; under the broad interpretation, schedule 3 paragraph 2 also protects an interest in land which, although not itself occupied, still ‘relates to’ occupied land. Third, I will consider the merits of both the broad and narrow interpretations. I will examine the alternative drafting options available to Parliament, analogous language in the pre-LRA 2002 case law, the suggestions of the Law Commission, and the policy implications of each interpretation. From these I will argue that only the narrow interpretation is ultimately convincing. As I will demonstrate, this conclusion has far-reaching implications for the interaction between postponement and protection provisions in the LRA 2002.

I have not read all the tributes that have been made to John Hume since his death in 2020, but I doubt if many—perhaps any—of them have got to the heart of his real achievement, which was twofold. On the one hand, he prevented a settlement of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status that seemed to be a real possibility in the late seventies and early eighties on what might have been called ‘Unionist’ principles (though it could have resulted in the end, or radical decline, of ‘Unionism’ as a force in Northern Ireland politics). On the other hand, along with Gerry Adams, Charles Haughey, and Father Alec Reid of the Clonard monastery in Belfast, he found a means by which the IRA could lay down its arms without the appearance of having been defeated—an appearance of defeat that would have had very damaging consequences for the cultural and political coherence of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland.   It needs to be said straightaway that the IRA were not defeated. Their achievement in maintaining the war and driving their enemies— the British army, with all the resources, both overt and covert, it possessed, together with the array of Ulster Protestant paramilitary forces—to a stalemate is very impressive. Pat Walsh, in Resurgence , his remarkable study of the resurgence of the Catholic community starting in the 1960s, suggests that, even as early as the late 1970s, elements in the IRA leadership had recognised that they could not ‘win’, if ‘winning’ meant ‘securing a united Ireland’.[1] But by that time so much energy, skill, and determination had been invested in the campaign that it had become the emblem of Catholic—especially Catholic working-class—resolve never to return to the near-50 years of humiliation they had suffered since the Westminster government imposed a separate, necessarily Protestant-dominated, government on them. An appearance of defeat would have had a severely demoralising effect on the community as a whole, the more so because so many young people were joining (with all the dangers—and excitement—that that implied), not because of any great longing for a united Ireland, but simply out of outrage at the presence of army soldiers in their streets and army helicopters in their skies.   A disruptive system of government   In the early 1980s, it was possible to believe (I certainly believed) that Northern Ireland was headed, on autopilot so to speak, towards what could have been a stable and permanent settlement. In principle, the political problem had been solved in 1972, with the ‘suspension’ of Stormont. Precisely because of the Catholic/Protestant division, Northern Ireland was the part of the United Kingdom least suitable for the establishment of a devolved government. In Northern Ireland, devolved government could only mean a permanent Unionist (Protestant) majority lording it over a permanent Nationalist (Catholic) minority. This was obviously not what the Catholic minority wanted. But the Catholic position wasn’t a simple matter of Republican sentiment. Catholic Ulster had been a redoubt of the old Home Rule movement against the new, determinedly separatist, Sinn Fein. The leading Ulster Catholic politician, Joseph Devlin, was well connected in Westminster and particularly well placed with regard to the emergence after the First World War of the Labour Party. He had been very much looking forward to continuing his Westminster career under the new circumstances that would have been created by Home Rule (a relatively minor devolution of power analogous to the present arrangements for Scotland and Wales). Even after partition, if Northern Ireland had continued to be governed directly by Westminster he would have made a formidable tribune for the Ulster Catholics. As it was, with effective power in the hands of his lifelong enemies, and all the political parties in Westminster washing their hands of responsibility for the place, it was as if he had the legs cut out from under him.   But nor did the Ulster Unionists want a devolved government for their part of Ireland. When, in May 1920, the Government of Ireland Act came to the House of Lords, the Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, abstained and protested powerfully, saying:   It has been said over and over again, ‘you want to oppress the Catholic minority, you want to get a Protestant Ascendancy over there’. We have never asked to govern any Catholic. We are perfectly satisfied that all of them, Protestant and Catholic, should be governed from this Parliament and we have always said that it was the fact that this Parliament was aloof entirely from these racial distinctions and religious distinctions, which was the strongest foundation for the Government of Ulster.[2]

Christopher A Marinello is an expert in recovering stolen, looted, and missing works of art. A lawyer for over 38 years, Marinello began his legal career as a litigator, negotiating complex title disputes between collectors, dealers, museums, and insurance companies. In 2013, he founded Art Recovery Group, a specialist practice providing due diligence, dispute resolution, and recovery services for the art market and the cultural heritage sector. Marinello has overseen the development of the ArtClaim Database, the most technologically advanced system in existence for identifying and recording issues and claims attached to works of art. Marinello has recovered over $400 million of stolen and looted artwork, and has worked on some of the most important recoveries of Nazi-looted art. CJLPA : I thought we could start with a bit about your career. How did you start off as an art lawyer? Christopher Marinello : I started off a while ago at art school, but I wasn’t particularly talented and was encouraged by others to try the law instead—with a law degree you can always go back to painting. So I went to law school and became a litigator, and worked in the courts of New York City for almost 20 years, and I developed my love for keeping my clients. I worked for artists, for galleries, collectors, museums, and whatnot. And then, in around 2013, I founded Arts Recovery International.   CJLPA : How did you come about doing that?   CM : I was working for the Art Loss Register as their General Counsel, and I started in New York and, at their request, moved to London. Then I left to start my own business. Of course, it’s very hard to tell a British businessman how to run their business when you’re an Italian American lawyer.   CJLPA : You’ve worked on the cases of some highly famous works of art. Would it be fair to say that fame and public intrigue around some of the cases you’ve worked on have been impediments to objective investigation?   CM : I don’t think so at all. In fact, some of the high-profile cases I have handled will never be disclosed publicly. The cases that we do disclose are for a reason: either because we are trying to publicly pressure a government or a certain party to resolve the matter in some fashion, or because we are trying to put pressure on the public to tell us the whereabouts of a stolen or looted painting. As lawyers, we do what our clients ask us to do. If they want the publicity we go forward. If not we remain confidential. If clients do decide to go forward publicly, it’s to apply pressure to somebody, or so the public knows that the painting is no longer subject to a title dispute, because they want to sell it or the painting has to be   sold, and they want the art market to feel comfortable that a title dispute has been resolved.

Philip Hoffman is Founder and CEO of the Fine Art Group, which focusses on art advisory, investment, and philanthropy. At 33 he became the youngest member of KPMG’s Management Board and later served as its Deputy CEO of Europe. He also worked for Christie’s for 12 years. He regularly comments on the art market in the international press. The Frick Collection is widely regarded as one of New York’s finest galleries. From the interiors of Vermeer to the forests of Fragonard, any enthusiast, collector or museumgoer would envy its collection. Around 300,000 people visit the collection each year, and in 2019 they saw shows on Giambattista Tiepolo’s Milanese frescoes and on French faience masterpieces.[1] It is easy to forget, though, that the Frick has depended on private collectors since its inception. There would be no Frick Museum without Mr and Mrs Frick, just as there would be no Courtauld Gallery without Samuel Courtauld, and no Kettle’s Yard without Jim and Helen Ede. Museums should remember that private collectors will facilitate their survival in times of trial and tribulation.   In conversation with Philip Hoffman, founder and CEO of the Fine Art Group, this article explores the ways in which the private collector supports the public institution.[2] Hoffman recalls how his clients work with public institutions: they send art around the globe, fund exhibitions, and make gifts to their beloved galleries. Although the idea is counterintuitive, public museums must continue to connect, engage, and communicate with private collectors. Loaning and philanthropy have never been more imperative for ensuring the permanency of our institutions. Collectors and museums are not ‘Romulus and Remus’, as the art world has come to believe. There are, it appears, two spaces on the Capitoline Hill. Our culture benefits from the presence of both collector and institution.   The Fine Art Group manages 140 different collections in 28 countries. From ‘Australia to Chile’ and from ‘New York to London’ its collectors invest in, assemble and donate art. Naturally, some motivations and ambitions are unique to the collector. Personal collections are a store of both monetary and social capital. Moreover, for many, buying art is an investment strategy, since art assets generally rise in value. It is tempting to believe that these objectives go against the public interest. The collector’s ambition to own  seems at odds with the institution’s ambition to exhibit, display, and educate . Private collections seem covert rather than overt, isolated  rather than accessible . Private is consistently considered ‘versus’ the public.   The social life of private collections, however, generally extends into the public realm, since their artworks are loaned and exhibited to the public. ‘We have lent major paintings from our own collections or art investments to museums’, Hoffman notes. Recently, they lent a Canaletto and a Cindy Sherman to shows about their respective artists. Collectors furnish exhibitions with artworks that museums could not afford, and the works they loan are integral to retrospective exhibitions. Collectors, then, participate with and enable public intentions—they facilitate in educating and exhibiting .

The months since my investiture have been remarkable in a number of ways. First and foremost, the continuing pandemic has changed the way my office engages with the public, replacing the in-person contact of what is traditionally a highly social role with virtual gatherings. At the same time, I find myself in a unique position to see and celebrate the innovation and strength with which individuals and organizations are responding to the challenges of the day. My goal, as we move through the pandemic and beyond, is to bring all of my fellow citizens along with me on the journey. I hope to shine a light on the heroes and community leaders who are finding meaningful ways to make life better for others, while honouring the traditions of service and the protection of democratic principles that stand at the heart of the viceregal role in Canada.   *   Premier Kenney; Chief Justice Fraser; Mr Speaker; Honourable Ministerial Colleagues; Honourable Daniel Vandal, Minister of Northern Affairs; Members of the Legislative Assembly; British Consul General Carolyn Saunders; Elder Cecil Crier and Indigenous Leaders; Members of the Judiciary; Mr Alain Laurencelle, Chancellor of the Order of St John; distinguished guests; my fellow Albertans; friends and my dear family:   I regret that most of my close family members are unable to be here today, but hopefully they are able to watch online.   I wish to begin by respectfully acknowledging that we are meeting on Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous people. We pay our respect to the First nation and Metis ancestors of this place and reaffirm our relationship with them. I thank Elder Cecil Crier for Blessings as I begin this extraordinary journey and I also thank Rocky Morin for the Honour Song he will be so generously offering later today.   C’est un grand honneur pour moi de m’addresser à vous audjourd’hui en tant que representante de l’Alberta de sa Majesté La Reine Elizabeth II.   I am both honoured and humbled to be addressing all of you today. I would like to begin by telling you a little about myself and by sharing how so much of my life has been shaped by a sense of hope.   I grew up in a house full of family in Kampala, Uganda, a beautiful place on the other side of the world. Indeed, there was a time when there were 15 of us living together under the same roof. Extended family and nuclear family were blended together. We didn’t know the difference. We lived, we played, and we prayed together. We were simply family, and family was always close, in every sense of the word.

Mark Cazalet, born 1964, trained at the Chelsea and then Falmouth Schools of Art, after which he held scholarships in Paris and India. He works in a variety of media, including engraved glass, paint, prints, mosaics, and graphic media. He has taught in several art institutions and has been a Senior Member of Faculty at The Royal Drawing School since 2012. Travel has always played an important role in his art. Through the experience of his journeys, he has opened up rich colloquy between contemporary and traditional arts, between classical and folk forms. Architecture, film, fiction, and theology have all played a role in his creative evolution.   Professor Frances Spalding, CBE, FRSL, PhD, the interviewer, is an art historian and biographer. After studying History of Art at the University of Nottingham, she became a specialist in twentieth-century British art. Following the publication of her British Art Since 1900 , in the Thames & Hudson ‘World of Art’ series, she was commissioned by the Tate to write its centenary history. She has also produced five biographies of artists as well as one on the poet Stevie Smith. She taught at Newcastle University 2000-15, becoming Professor of Art History. In 2014 she guest-curated the exhibition ‘Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision’ for the National Portrait Gallery. During the year 2015-6 she acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine and became a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.   This conversation took place at Clare Hall, Cambridge, on 25 February 2021.   Professor Frances Spalding: Our guest this evening is Mark Cazalet. Mark is an artist who has pursued a very wide-ranging career. He could be described as a latter-day John Piper, for, like Piper, he has worked in a variety of media, received major public commissions, has a strong sense of place and has travelled widely. Both Piper and Cazalet remind me of Beethoven’s remark, ‘Art demands of us that we do not stand still’, a challenging statement that refers to much more than travel. Travel, however, is something which many of us have greatly missed during the COVID crisis. Some years back I heard a speaker at a conference in Cambridge say, ‘The most radical thing you can do today is to stay at home’. This was with reference to ecology, but today we understand this command in relation to COVID, as well as in relation to our carbon footprint. Yet the fact that a common swift can stay in the air for ten months without touching ground shows how innate within the natural world, including within us, is the need to move, to migrate, to travel. Friedrich Nietzsche advised, ‘Never trust a thought that didn’t come by walking’. And I want to suggest that the current interest in reviving a habit that began seven hundred years ago, namely that of pilgrimage, is further evidence of our need to locate ourselves in place and time, and to realise that remembrance is key to the continuing of life.   This evening Mark Cazalet will deliver a presentation on his work and travels, and the understanding he has gained from the latter. So, over to you, Mark.   Mark Cazalet : Frances wrote the first important essay on my work back in 1994, and since then has put her finger on the pressure points in my work, consistently, sparingly but fiercely. This opportunity to present the role that travel has had in my work has made me aware that my creativity has been subject to two forces: a centrifugal force, and a gravitational force. Since the seventies, the opportunity to propel ourselves out into the far corners of the world has been an exciting liberation. But it has come at a cost. I think we are now beginning to ask ourselves why we are travelling such big distances. What do we really learn from these travels? And how might—in this present time and after the pandemic—our notions of  significant  travel change? That is what I call the gravitational aspect—what matters to us here and now and within our environment, and which calls on our need to stay still, the alternative to travel.   Because I will start by showing you some of my early work, which I’m frankly terrified to see again, I thought I’d jump ahead in this first slide to a recent work from my Kyoto Zen gardens series which I’m pleased with and excited by (fig 1). But I want to compare it with work from my degree show (such as fig 2). The comparison makes me aware that, as an artist, you don’t travel forward in a linear way, but are endlessly bumping into old iterations of yourself. With creative work you travel cyclically. Things you thought you had dealt with come up again. While studying at Falmouth, in Cornwall, I imagined myself as another Peter Lanyon, in a glider, flying over the countryside and becoming a Cornish abstract painter. As so often happens on long journeys, you end up doing the very opposite thing you thought you would do. I ended up as a student hunting in charity shops collecting detritus and creating strange, theatrical, mise-en-scène, dark cityscapes. Fig 1. The stillness the dancing, Kyoto Zen garden collage (Mark Cazalet 2020, collage papers, inks, MT tape, pencils, and oil pastels, 46 x 130cm).

The will to transparency, the scopic drive to see through, to scrutinise naked truth, encounters a significant impediment in the dead letters, the literae mortuae , of law. The puppet show of juridical interpretation, the marionettes that are pulled as heavy signifiers, gothic black-letter dogmas from the pickle jar of precedent, perform a spectacle that is always a trope and costume, a stage and screen away from the viewing subject. As the pop philosopher and ‘narcotheorist’ Laurent de Sutter observes of a prime example of this paradox—the new Palais de Justice, the judicial city and island of law designed by Renzo Piano on the outskirts of Paris entirely in glass façade—it is the opposite of transparent.[1] The intimidating size, the insular location, the monumental aura, and the nomothetic lines of the rectangular structure suggest, at best, a juggernaut of justice. It appears open to the lines of sight but closed and excluding of any miniature mortal who might wish, in some unauthorised fashion, to enter and somehow animate the dead letters or lost epistles of what is to all appearances an instance of vox Dei suprema lex esto . Neither missive nor monumental building was authored in any recognisable manner by the populace.   The megalith that replaces the classical architecture, highly symbolic designs, and artwork of the old Palais on Île de la Cité suggests, in more quotidian terms, a vast office building, an indistinct corporate structure not so dissimilar to a rectangular and stacked version of the World Trade Center. There is nothing legal, no symbol of jurist or justice, in the plain glass façade. The use of windows reverses the traditional windowless spaces of judgement, the subtly in camera character of the courthouse, and suggests the appearance of an interior, a window into the beating heart of legality,  figura fenestris  appearing in law. The glass, however, is more panopticon   and occlusion than it is, in any sensible concept of appearance, likely to be entered by the viewing eye. The passing subject will have their eye deflected to the building as a structure, a scalar manifestation of forensis as a faceless leviathan, a supraterrestrial but blankly uniform   front. The other irony is that if the gaze is focussed beyond the reflections in the panes to pierce the wall of glass, what is visible is primarily a corporate space of passages, corridors, stairs and benches for waiting.[2] The juridical interior is not open to view, and so the eye that penetrates the windows will see only a labyrinth of nondescript open spaces leading inexorably to the closed doors and opaque walls of the inner sancta, the temples of judgement, the hotwired, multiply screened, media-saturated courts. Where earlier legal architecture, replete with columns, classical statuary, and monumental inscriptions in archaic languages, invited attention to the façade, to the appreciation of an illocutionary presence and civic message, a symbolic spectacle of justice and law, the glass façade acts more as a mirror deflecting sight to the presence and size of this particular space station.[3]   The visible leviathan perhaps makes its optical case too vehemently, a hyperbole that often signals decay and demise—but such proleptic prognostications are for other occasions. The paradox to be pursued here is rather the tension between the purported transparency of the exterior, the sense of remediation from stone to glass, and the visually desipient opacity of the interior. An installation of the juridical in the remediated form of a monumental, quadripartite glass structure creates an impermeable visibility, a faceless mausoleum of legal acts that effectuates the trompe-l’œil of being a window into invisible proceedings. The trick and trope of the design is to create the appearance of transparency, the illusion of exposure of the physical presence and public accessibility of the juridical, to make it ordinary, popular, recognisably corporate, while creating a site on the periphery of the city that discourages both viewing and visiting. The apparent is never simply appearance, and to look into is also always a matter of looking away, of noticing and of overlooking, as the expression goes. Law is no different in its scopic choices, its rules of seeing, as also in its blindspots and scotomising aspects.   Scopic desires   Juridical optical desire, by which I mean no more than the institutional regulation of appearance and disappearance, and most specifically, the rules that control looking and being viewed, is strictly regulated. When cameras were allowed for the first time into a terrorist trial in the new Palais, they were prohibited from filming anyone other than the speakers.[4] The lens was blinkered, the images were to be restricted to the orators and the dialogue. Discourse governed sight. Filming in the UK Supreme Court has similar rules, and static cameras that relay bench and advocates. At common law, the regimen of lines of sight, spaces of audition, and optical scrutiny is surprisingly limited, as also are the means of looking, the lenses, ocular and artificial, that are permitted and those that are forbidden. This dates back to section 41 of the Criminal Evidence Act 1925, which makes it an offence to ‘take or attempt to take in any court any photograph, or with a view to publication make or attempt to make in any court any portrait or sketch, of any person’ participating in the proceedings. This statute against visual representation of parties was pitched against the social media of the era, the so-called ‘yellow press’, the legislation responding most directly to popular criticism of a death penalty decision and the wide circulation of a photograph of the judge, a black cloth over his bewigged head.[5] Thenceforth, the tableau vivant  of judicial determinations could only be seen in the minimalist sense of attending the trial, and the viewing cannot be shown to the public in any other form of direct visual reportage. A variety of later criminal laws of procedure further restrain the modes of viewing and relaying proceedings.

Camilla Perera-de Wit is the Secretary-General and Director-General of the Netherlands Arbitration Institute (NAI). Her previous experience in dispute resolution includes her work at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) and at P.R.I.M.E. Finance. She is a board member of the Court for Arbitration of Art (CAfA) in Rotterdam.   Bert Demarsin is a law professor at KU Leuven, who has conducted extensive work on art disputes. His work particularly focuses on provenance and authenticity disputes. He is also a board member of CAfA.   Elliot Wright spoke in December 2020 with two of CAfA’s board members, Camilla Perera-de Wit and Bert Demarsin. We spoke about the nature and current state of art law, including difficulties in recent years, and the role CAfA can play in this field, as well as arbitration more generally.   Art law   Demarsin started by explaining that ‘there are actually four big fields within art and cultural heritage law’. First, art has to be created—so there can be issues with attribution and copyright. Second, art has to be preserved—this is not so true for contemporary art perhaps, but for cultural heritage there are a whole host of regulations, for instance on whether it can be exported or on how it should be restored or preserved. Third, circulation, which Demarsin describes as being the basis of the art business. This field covers auctions, authenticity, theft, and smuggling and other issues relating to the movement of art. Fourth, and finally, is the field Demarsin calls valorisation—which is how one can take advantage of one’s ownership of art, and realise its value through exhibitions or merchandising, and the conflicts that might arise from this.   Whilst conflicts can, and do, arise in all these areas, most arise in respect of circulation, as this is where the business of art trading is carried out. The vast capital in this market means disputes are more likely to arise from any disagreement, and the number of transactions means disagreements are not uncommon. There are also circulation issues in respect of restitution of art, and questions of looted art and cultural heritage. Even now there are cases arising from asserting ownership of art which was unlawfully confiscated in the Second World War, as well as ongoing disputes in relation to cultural heritage such as that surrounding the Elgin Marbles, and more recent debates on the restitution of colonial heritage. Here, Demarsin refers to his native Belgium’s colony in the Congo, but of course other European states, such as the UK, similarly seized art in that period. These are the disputes which feature more prominently in the public press, and therefore also the public conscience more generally, but for art dealers authentication is a more common and important problem.   Perera-de Wit then spoke about some of the features of art law which present unique challenges in dispute resolution. Speaking from her experience in dispute resolution, including at the Permanent Court for Arbitration (PCA) and at P.R.I.M.E. Finance, she pointed to the increasing complexity and globalisation of disputes, including in the art world. In the art world, parties are increasingly likely to be based in different jurisdictions, and traceable agreements documenting the transactions are not always in place. Where disputes arise, they can be technical in nature. They benefit from specialist legal knowledge as well as expert factual analysis. That expertise is not always readily available in the local courts, which makes alternative dispute resolution an attractive option in the art world. This also led to the founding of CAfA, to prevent such disputes being resolved by what could be ‘a roll of the dice’, as Perera-de Wit put it, as to whether the dispute was resolved in a time-efficient manner with an outcome that the markets can rely upon.