A. Tillard and the Legal Questions Behind the Global Art Market

Cross-border art transactions carry two kinds of legal uncertainty that reform proposals typically treat as one: incomplete verification of who owned, sold, or previously possessed a work, and divergent national rules about what follows once ownership and possession are established beyond dispute. Drawing on a nineteen-year restitution dispute in which the underlying facts were settled well before the litigation ended, this article shows that only the first kind of uncertainty yields to better documentation, tracing, or verification infrastructure; the second persists because national legal systems assign the risk of a stolen object's resale differently, a distributive choice that additional evidence does not change. Recent computational and blockchain-based compliance proposals close real gaps in beneficial-ownership tracing and anti-money-laundering enforcement. Applied to restitution litigation, the same proposals leave the underlying divergence untouched. Reclassifying the deficits identified in existing legal-architecture scholarship along this line separates the problems computational investment can solve from the one that needs a binding choice-of-law rule instead.