Elle Davis, Vice President of FALS and second year law student, is a complete novice on the topic of art law. Her journey began her senior year as an undergraduate at University of Florida. Because she completed her required courses her junior year, she used her extra elective space for exploring art. She dove in head first with a studio drawing class—what she considered her most challenging class in college—followed by art history, music history, and a sketchbook course. By years end, she decided she needed to find a way to incorporate art into her plans for law school. Over the course of her year off before law school, her basic level “pre-legal-research” research led her to believe art law equaled intellectual property law. As a result, she decided, “New York is where I needed to go, and Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus was screaming my name.”
At Fordham, she discovered art law does in fact include intellectual property, but art law is truly more of a hand-stitched blanket that lays across the many fields of law, rather than a decorative pillow tossed on the bed of intellectual property. Elle partially credits FALS president, Morgan Manley, for introducing her to the many facets of art law: artists’ rights, IP protections, gallery or museum dispute resolution, provenance work, Nazi looted-art claims, regulating the last frontier (the art market is one of the last significant markets to be substantially unregulated), and so on. The opportunities for lawyers to get involved with the arts are abound, and growing!
Elle and FALS invite current Fordham law students and alumni to learn with Elle and get a taste of what art law can cover at FALS’ first event, The Nexus of Art and Law, to be held on September 10 at 12:30pm. A panel of three art law practitioners and Fordham law alumni will speak about their experience in the field. The panel will be moderated by the FALS faculty advisor Leila Amineddoleh, Professor of Art and Cultural Heritage Law at Fordham University School of Law and partner of Galluzzo & Amineddoleh LLP. The panelists are Christopher Robinson ’01, Partner, Davis, Wright & Tremaine LLP; Nicole Mazanitis ’10, Associate, Curtis, Mallet-Provost, Colt & Mosle LLP; and Jane Pakenham ’13, Associate General Counsel at the Calder Foundation.
Click here for the registration page. You must R.S.V.P. to attend as seats are limited. Lunch will be provided by Chipotle. This will also count for FALS’ first general body meeting, so it is a great opportunity to become a member of Fordham Art Law Society! The FALS Board looks forward to meeting you all, and please feel free to email fordhamartlawsociety@gmail.com with any questions or, better yet, stop by FALS’ table at the Fordham law Student Activities Fair on Sept. 2nd!
Fordham Art Law Society {FALS} 