The paper assesses some of the major global issues concerning cultural property
trade from the perspective of legal pluralism. It does not deal specifically
with legal pluralism itself, rather it makes use of a legal pluralist approach to
analyze and better understand the multi-layered dimension of the law(s) of
trade in cultural property. Legal pluralism generally aims to underline the
social and cultural dimension of law, thus showing how law is an open system,
made of intertwining official and unofficial rules, produced by a variety
of state and non-state actors. In the age of globalization, legal pluralism
has thus become a useful prism through which to analyze the complexity of
global legal regimes, including that governing the transnational trade of
cultural movables, particularly pieces of art.
