When comparative law scholar John Merryman joined the Stanford Law School faculty in the 1950s, nobody was talking about “art law.” But when his wife Nancy, a Palo Alto gallerist, started coming home with thorny legal questions, he saw an opportunity to explore a new frontier.

In 1970, Merryman conceived Art and the Law, widely believed to be the country’s first-ever art law course. Some in the academy were initially skeptical, according to a 2015 Stanford Lawyer remembrance, but the idea proved visionary. More than 50 years later, art law remains a popular offering at Stanford Law and at dozens of law schools nationwide. And the recently released sixth edition of Merryman’s authoritative companion textbook ensures his influence endures. 

First published in 1979, Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts—originally co-authored with the late Stanford art historian Albert Elsen—has become the gold standard in art law, helping to train generations of students to counsel museums, handle art restitution cases, and advise clients at the crossroads of culture, commerce, and the law. 

The new edition, published this spring by Cambridge University Press, spans nearly 1,200 pages. It invites students to wrestle with fascinating legal questions across broad swaths of the law: To what extent can artists control the reproduction or distribution of their own works? How do taxes affect artists and collectors? Who owns relics of the past? How much does the First Amendment protect obscene or politically offensive works of art? 

“It offers a full buffet of the world of art law,” says sixth edition co-author Simon J. Frankel, a California Superior Court judge who has taught art law at Stanford Law since 2012. “If you want to teach a class on art and intellectual property, everything you need is here. If you want to focus on art and museums or cultural property, it’s all in here too. It’s essentially multiple textbooks in one.” 

Frankel collaborated with University of Miami Law School professor Stephen K. Urice on the new edition, with Merryman—who participated in early planning before his death in 2015—retaining his place as a co-author. 

Urice met Merryman as a Harvard Law student, traveling weekly to New York to audit Merryman’s art law class at NYU when Merryman was a visiting professor there. Years later, he worked alongside Merryman on the fifth edition of Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts. “John’s scholarship set the standard for what art law could be,” Urice says. “With this edition, we wanted to preserve his voice while also ensuring the book speaks to the realities facing today’s students, practitioners, and the institutions they serve.”

Updating for a New Era

Frankel started teaching art law with his father, James B. Frankel, at Berkeley Law School in the 1990s and recalls his father describing art law as a “feast for omnivores.” And Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts reflects the field’s wide-ranging, interdisciplinary nature while responding to shifts in the legal and cultural landscape, such as the rise of artificial intelligence.

“Generative AI is raising fascinating legal questions,” Frankel notes. “Can AI systems ingest copyrighted images for training? Who owns the copyright in AI-generated works? And beyond the law, how will this technology change art-making itself? These are big, unresolved questions, and we’re just at the beginning.”

An extensively revised section of the new edition deals with repatriation. “We’ve seen a noticeable acceleration in attitudes toward returning cultural objects to source countries,” Frankel says, pointing to France’s return of artifacts to Benin and ongoing debates over the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles. “This raises important questions about what it means to be a ‘universal museum’ in an era when many cultures are demanding the return of their heritage.”

The authors also restructured the book to follow what Frankel describes as “the arc of the art world,” starting with the artist, then the market, then museums, and finally cultural property disputes. They brought the content current with significant developments in copyright, First Amendment law, and cultural property. 

“Traditional law school casebooks are mostly cases and statutes,” Frankel says. “This book tries to go further. It brings in commentary, primary materials, and cultural context. It’s designed to help readers understand not just the law, but the art world itself—how artists, dealers, collectors, and museums interact, and the unique issues they face.” Alongside judicial opinions and statutes, the authors include sample contracts, excerpts from depositions, international treaties, and passages from novels.

And then there are the stories. “The people in the art world are colorful,” Frankel says. “You encounter everything from unscrupulous dealers to visionary curators to heirs fighting for the return of stolen family treasures. It’s endlessly compelling. Even for students who don’t go on to practice in this area, art law offers something critical to a legal education. It looks at how the law interacts with the real world—how it governs relationships and norms that weren’t necessarily developed with the law in mind.”