Justice -0, Liz Taylor - 1 (Or Really, Millions)

Yesterday, in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court (Orkin v. Taylor), the Canadian descendants of Margarethe Mauthner lost their battle when the court rejected their appeal, allowing Taylor to retain possession of the 118-year-old Vincent Van Gogh painting "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy". Mauthner, a Jew, had purchased the van Gogh in 1907, and fled Germany in 1939 for South Africa. Her family alleged that she had been forced under duress to sell prior to leaving the country. The painting passed from a German art dealer to an art collector before being auctioned off and purchased by Taylor's father in 1963 in London for about $257K.

The suit argued that it should have been returned to the family members under the 1998 U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act. The In May, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld the dismissal of the lawsuit, holding that the descendants, Mauthner's great-grandchildren, had waited too long to bring the action (the family claimed they had no knowledge of ownership until 2001), and that the 1998 law didn't give individuals the right to sue private owners.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis stole an estimated 600,000 European artworks. Today, nearly 100,000 museum-quality pieces are still missing.

The high court turned down the appeal without any comment or recorded dissent.