A veteran of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Antiquities Trafficking Unit is now chairman of the Harvard Law Review. Apsara Iyer, 29 and three semesters away from graduating from Harvard Law School, leads a team of 98 writers. She fills the year-long post previously held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama.
Iyer brings valuable and unusual experience to this office. In 2021, she is co-author, with Matthew Bogdanos, of the “Statement of Facts in the Matter of a Grand Jury Investigation into a Private New York Antiquities Collector”, an inventory of objects and dealers associated with Michael Steinhardt, which returned 180 items worth $70 million that the New York District Attorney estimated were stolen from their home country. Steinhardt, a prominent financier and benefactor of museums, was banned by the court from collecting antiquities, an unprecedented sentence, although he avoided prison.
“In those 180 works, there were 180 stories,” says Iyer, who took a year off from law school to work on the Steinhardt case. She has also worked on cases of smuggling antiquities from India and Cambodia, which resulted in guilty pleas from dealers. Prior to returning to Harvard, she served as a supervising investigative analyst, assistant to chief of staff duties in the Antiquities Trafficking Unit.
“Issues related to art, trafficked art and stolen art really intersect with many different bodies of law,” she says. “In a role like this [at the Harvard Law Review]you get an overview of what the law academy does and you can observe many different scholars who are at the forefront of different fields.
For many people my age, we grew up at a time when we witnessed firsthand the destruction of cultural heritage and how that intersected with issues such as terrorist financing or money laundering.
Although Iyer does not promise a reorientation of the Harvard Law Review towards art and antiquities, “there may be an intersection between issues involving illegally exported and stolen art and issues of international law, international law property, contract law and criminal law, certainly,” she said. said. “I see there’s a learning experience for myself and for others interested in recovering art, and seeing the panoply of pieces out there and finding a way to connect between those works that are in more recognized areas within the law and the more niche areas of art and art trafficking.
“It’s an evolving area, it’s an area of growing interest, but it’s not one that has received the same level of attention in the academy as other areas like the law of property,” she adds.
Iyer’s parents were born in India and she grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana. She speaks Hindi and Tamil. As an undergraduate at Yale University, she remembers “seeing the ruins of Palmyra so distinctly blown up by Isis, and so I think for a lot of people my age, we grew up in a time when we saw firsthand the destruction of cultural heritage, and what it might look like, and how it intersects with issues like terrorist financing or money laundering.”
“The idea that heritage is something that is in danger and linked to broader political issues became really palpable – all you had to do was turn on a TV or go to YouTube. could see what antiquities trafficking could really be related to,” she adds.
Iyer also recalled being at Tanesar, a site in Rajasthan in northern India that had been looted, and meeting people who lived nearby. “For them, it wasn’t just an artifact, it wasn’t just a statue, it was part of their heritage,” she says. “And I vividly remember asking the question, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ And that was a wake-up call and it led me down the path that I’ve been on.
