Stephen Urice

Professor, University of Miami School of Law

---

Stephen K. Urice is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law. He also serves as Director of the Project for Cultural Heritage Law & Policy, which he founded in 2003 to promote the teaching of cultural heritage issues in law schools, schools of public policy, and in departments of art history, anthropology, archaeology, and related fields.

Urice earned his bachelor’s degree at Tufts University and his Ph.D. (art history) at Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation focused on Qasr Kharana, an early Islamic site in the Jordanian desert where Urice directed an archaeological expedition between 1977 and 1987. After earning his law degree in 1984 at Harvard Law School, Urice practiced trusts and estates law with a special emphasis on private foundations in New York and Los Angeles. Prior to his current appointment at U.M., Urice served as lecturer-in-law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, officer of The Pew Charitable Trusts with responsibility for the Trusts’ national culture program, and Director of Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library.

At U.M., Urice teaches art law, museum law, cultural heritage law, and trusts and estates. He has served for many years on the faculty of the American Law Institute-American Bar Association’s annual course of study “Legal Issues in Museum Administration.” Urice lectures nationally and internationally on cultural heritage law and policy. His recent publications include the 5th edition of Merryman, Elsen, and Urice, Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts (Kluwer, 2007).