UC Law lecture looks at complicated issue of Holocaust era theft, restitution
The story of the paper trail of “Jewish money” stolen by various European institutions during the Holocaust is a complicated and still incomplete narrative. The upcoming lecture, “We Used It When We Had It: The Alien Tort Claims Act in Successful Litigation Against 26 Banks for Holocaust-Era Theft in Vichy France,” presented by Professor Emeritus Richard H. Weisberg, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, will explore the way that U.S. federal courts assisted in both bringing a firmer factual base to historians and a measure of justice to those victimized by property theft during the Second World War. Professor Weisberg also will discuss why more recent changes in the law have made it far less likely that Holocaust victims and their heirs could successfully bring federal court actions against private or governmental entities today.
This event, the 2024 Victor E. Schwartz Lecture in Torts, will be held at 12:15 p.m., Friday, Nov. 22, 2024 in Room 160 of the College of Law (2925 Campus Green Drive). CLE: 1 hour of general CLE has been approved for OH and KY.
The story of the paper trail of “Jewish money” stolen by various European institutions during the Holocaust is a complicated and still incomplete narrative. This lecture speaks to the way that U.S. federal courts assisted in both bringing a firmer factual base to historians and a measure of justice to those victimized by property theft during the Second World War.
During WWII, commercial banks operating under the antisemitic Vichy regime in France confiscated the assets of those depositors recognized as Jews under Vichy law. After the war, many efforts to recover these seized funds (from banks both in France and many other European nations) foundered due to what the banks characterized as a lack of adequate records—essentially once again victimizing the depositors, whose papers had been confiscated and often destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Beginning in the 1990s, however, a new wave of class action litigation against European institutions successfully broke the logjam. Benisti v. Banque Paribas, for example, was a class action filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York under the Alien Tort Claims Act, naming 26 banks, including two American and one British bank, as defendants. Rejecting the arguments the banks had previously relied on to avoid liability, the district court ruled in 2000 that the case could go forward. The ruling prompted a series of settlements that resulted in the payment of millions of dollars in compensation to claimants whose deposits had been confiscated.
The successful plaintiffs in Benisti and other Holocaust tort cases relied in part on Professor Weisberg’s 1996 book, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France, which included a “smoking gun” in the form of documentation from the archives regarding the non-French banking defendants. In this year’s Victor E. Schwartz Lecture in Torts, Professor Weisberg, who was of counsel to the plaintiffs throughout the litigation and until the ultimate settlement in the State Department offices during the waning days of the Clinton Administration, will comment on Benisti and other litigation arising out of the Holocaust. The lecture will explain why more recent changes in the law have made it far less likely that Holocaust victims and their heirs could successfully bring federal court actions against private or governmental entities today.
Professor Emeritus Richard Weisberg
Richard H. Weisberg is a Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law. He was an Obama appointee to the Commission on the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. Professor Weisberg has helped litigate successfully in American federal courts on behalf of Holocaust survivors and their heirs, providing a measure of justice for World War II victims of anti-Semitism.
President Nicholas Sarkozy of France awarded him the Legion of Honor in 2008. The founding director at Cardozo of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Program and the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy, he writes widely in those areas, including his book Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France and essays on First Amendment developments in the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a pioneer in the growing law and literature movement worldwide, and his books The Failure of the Word and Poethics have been widely translated. In 2014, he published In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility (Oxford University Press). The book argues that a willingness to embrace intransigence allows us to recognize the value of our beliefs, which are always at risk of being compromised or equivocated. He has visited many undergraduate institutions in the U.S., at law schools around the country, and in France, Denmark and China, where he is an honorary professor of law at Wuhan University.
His staging of legal dilemmas in great fictional works has won notices from The New York Times, the National Law Journal, and The New Yorker magazine. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of Rockefeller Foundation, NEH and ACLS grants. He holds a B.A. from Brandeis University, and his Ph.D. from Cornell is in French and comparative literature. While teaching those subjects on the graduate faculty of the University of Chicago, Professor Weisberg earned his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was an editor of the Columbia Law Review. He has been associated with the firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York and Coudert Freres in Paris.
Lead photo: istockphoto.com; Weisberg: provided
Latest UC News
- Nippert Stadium: The 1960sBearcats basketball legend Jack Twyman was selected by the Rochester Royals in the second round of the 1955 NBA draft and the franchise moved to Cincinnati in 1957, becoming the Cincinnati Royals. Oscar Robertson would follow in the 1960s, and on his heels wearing red, white, and blue at Cincinnati Gardens were fellow UC stars Tom Thacker and George Wilson. Cincinnati basketball won back-to-back titles in 1961 and 1962 (and nearly grabbed a third, falling to Loyola Chicago in ’63).
- UC to celebrate Transfer Student WeekUC observes National Transfer Student Week, a week-long event dedicated to highlighting challenges transfer students face, while bringing together the campus community to celebrate the achievements of this unique student population.
- Free exams at UC’s Speech & Hearing Clinic attract professional musiciansAt the University of Cincinnati’s Speech & Hearing Clinic, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra percussionist David Fishlock found resources such as custom musician earplugs and free hearing evaluations that will help protect his hearing without sacrificing his ability to hear other musicians. He was so impressed with the student-led clinic, which is supervised by a licensed audiologist, that he told other orchestra members about it. The Speech & Hearing Clinic is staffed by 15 first-year clinical doctoral students in the audiology department of UC’s College of Allied Health Sciences. They offer comprehensive hearing evaluations for free and can provide devices such as hearing aids and earplugs.
- Voices of Injustice share stories of wrongful conviction on a Cleveland stageOhio Innocence Project at UC Law exonerees Michael Sutton, Laurese Glover and Charles Jackson share a painful journey. The men helped formed the advocacy group Voices of Injustice for those wrongfully convicted. The group's performance, 'The Lynchings Among Us' was featured by public radio's WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
- The nation is watching the U.S. Senate race in OhioCincinnati Edition talks to University of Cincinnati Associate Professor David Niven about the U.S. Senate race in Ohio that is attracting a lot of national attention.
- New climate change health research center under development at UCThe National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health has awarded a grant to the University of Cincinnati to establish the Cincinnati Center for Climate and Health.