Republic of Austria et al. v. Altmann (541 U.S. 677)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 7, 2004 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 541 U.S. 677 · 124 S. Ct. 2240
- Decided
- June 7, 2004
- Term
- October Term 2003
- Vote
- 6–3
- Majority author
- Justice Stevens
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Justice Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court. In 1998 an Austrian journalist, granted access to the Austrian Gallery’s archives, discovered evidence that certain valuable works in the Gallery’s collection had not been donated by their rightful owners but had been seized by the Nazis or expropriated by the Austrian Republic after World War II. The journalist provided some of that evidence to respondent, who in turn filed this action to recover possession of six Gustav Klimt paintings. Prior to the Nazi invasion of Austria, the paintings had hung in the palatial Vienna home of respondent’s uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Czechoslovakian Jew and patron of the arts. Respondent claims ownership of the paintings under a will executed by her uncle after he fled Austria in 1938. She alleges that the Gallery obtained possession of the paintings through wrongful conduct in the years during and after World War II. The defendants (petitioners here) — the Republic of Austria and the Austrian Gallery (Gallery), an instrumentality of the Republic — filed a motion to dismiss the complaint asserting, among other defenses, a claim of sovereign immunity. The District Court denied the motion, 142 F. Supp. 2d 1187 (CD Cal. 2001), and the Court of Appeals affirmed, 317 F. 3d 954 (CA9 2002), as amended, 327 F. 3d 1246 (2003). We granted certiorari limited to the question whether the Foreign…
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