Derek Fincham

Dr. Derek Fincham is a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, where he has taught since 2010 and serves as a frequent faculty advisor to moot court teams. He teaches Legal Research and Writing and Art Law. Prior to joining the faculty, he was a Westerfield Fellow at Loyola University in New Orleans. Dr. Fincham earned his J.D. at Wake Forest University before undertaking comparative research at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where he received his Ph.D. in 2008 for his thesis on U.S. and U.K. responses to the illicit trade in cultural property. He also serves on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Cultural Property and has presented his research to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Stanford Law School, the University of Siena, and the University of Leicester, among others.

Dr. Fincham will present "From Looting to Laundering: Who Bears Responsibility for Cultural Property Harm?" Drawing on concrete case examples, he will offer a framework for thinking about legal and ethical responsibility across the full cultural object transit chain, from looters and brokers to museums, donors, and institutional boards. He will examine how legal liability often fails to reach key actors, and how ethical responsibility and institutional governance can meaningfully reduce trafficking incentives. He will close with a practical set of due diligence and preservation checkpoints for translating values into decisions.