Patty Gerstenblith

Patty Gerstenblith is Distinguished Research Professor of Law at DePaul University and Director of its Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law. In 2011, President Obama appointed her to serve as Chair of the President's Cultural Property Advisory Committee in the Department of State on which she had previously served as a Public Representative in the Clinton administration. Since 2020, she has served as President of the Board of Directors of the US Committee of the Blue Shield and Chair of the Blue Shield International Working Group on Countering Trafficking of Cultural Objects. She lectures and publishes widely in the United States and internationally on the protection of cultural property during armed conflict, preservation of archaeological heritage, and the trade in archaeological and other cultural objects. Her book, Cultural Objects and Reparative Justice: A Legal and Historical Analysis, was published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2023. The fourth edition of her casebook, Art, Cultural Heritage and the Law, was published in 2019. She is founding president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (2005-2011), a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, an Expert for the Fulbright Specialist Project at the Department of Antiquities of Jordan in 2019, the Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College in 2021, a member of the American Bar Association’s International Art and Cultural Heritage Law steering committee, and the Archaeological Institute of America’s Charles Eliot Norton National Lecturer for the 2023/24 academic year. Gerstenblith received her AB from Bryn Mawr College, PhD in art history and anthropology from Harvard University, JD from Northwestern University and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Before joining the DePaul law faculty, Gerstenblith clerked for the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.​