The legal and financial questions shaping the art world’s next decade are being decided right now — in San Francisco courtrooms, on tribal lands, and inside technology companies redefining what it means to create and own art. The Berkeley Art, Law, and Finance Intensive Seminar is a four-day program that puts you at the center of it: seminar sessions with leading scholars and practitioners, site visits to the Bay Area institutions and companies where these questions are live, and a cross-professional cohort of attorneys, museum leaders, collectors, advisors, and artists learning in the same room. Limited enrollment. Participants receive a Berkeley Law Certificate of Participation in the Art, Law, and Finance Intensive Seminar.
Program at a Glance
Date — Week of November 30, 2026
Duration — 4 days
Location — UC Berkeley & Bay Area institutions
Format — Mostly seminar, with substantial field experience
Cohort Size — Limited enrollment
Faculty — Leading legal scholars, art law practitioners, and industry experts
Credential — Berkeley Law Certificate of Participation in the Art, Law, and Finance Intensive Seminar · CA MCLE offered (see Credential and CLE Credit section below for details).
Tuition — $5,000 (introductory pricing for the inaugural cohort)
Why the Bay Area?
New York has the largest art market. London dominates Old Masters. But the Bay Area is where the legal and regulatory future of the art world is being shaped — and contested.
Two of the most significant AI copyright cases in the world are now before San Francisco federal courts. Andersen v. Stability AI — the class action testing whether AI image generators infringe artists’ copyrights — is in active litigation blocks from Midjourney’s headquarters, with summary judgment briefing expected in early 2027. Getty Images v. Stability AI, originally filed in Delaware, was refiled in the Northern District of California, where a federal judge allowed six of seven claims to proceed — including copyright infringement, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and unfair competition. Across the Atlantic, the UK High Court largely ruled in Stability AI’s favor in the parallel Getty litigation, finding that trained diffusion models do not themselves constitute “infringing copies” — a finding that diverges from the theories still being litigated in U.S. courts and is shaping the transatlantic debate over AI-generated art. Getty has received permission to appeal aspects of the UK ruling. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the D.C. Circuit’s holding in Thaler v. Perlmutter that works autonomously generated by AI cannot receive copyright protection under U.S. law.
But AI litigation is only part of the story. UC Berkeley’s own Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology is navigating some of the most complex repatriation questions under NAGPRA. Adobe is building digital provenance infrastructure in San Jose.
The hardest legal questions in art today — who owns AI-generated work, how securities law applies to fractional interests, what digital tools mean for cultural property claims — are still open. Courts and regulators are working them out in real time, and much of that work is happening here.
UC Berkeley School of Law sits at the center: leading scholars in tech, IP, and business law, surrounded by the institutions and innovators defining what comes next. No other program offers this combination: a top law school, proximity to the litigation and regulation defining the field, and direct access to the institutions and companies at the center of it.
Who Should Attend
Art law sits at the intersection of multiple professions—and so does this program. We bring together people who rarely learn in the same room: the attorney advising a collector on a disputed Basquiat sits next to the curator navigating a repatriation claim; the wealth planner structuring an art-backed loan learns alongside the artist whose work is being tokenized.
No prior art law specialization is required. Sessions are accessible to those without legal training while remaining substantive for practicing lawyers. What matters is professional experience and curiosity about where art, law, and money intersect — and the willingness to learn from people who see it differently than you do.
Offsite activities and site visits encourage dialogue across professional lines. You’ll leave with a network that spans the field.
What You’ll Walk Away With
An understanding of the current state of AI copyright litigation — including Andersen v. Stability AI and its implications — sufficient to advise a client, brief your board, or inform your own creative practice.
Firsthand exposure to NAGPRA repatriation challenges, digital provenance infrastructure, and the regulatory questions courts are actively deciding — taught in the place where much of it is happening.
Practical frameworks for navigating consignment and title disputes, art-secured lending, authentication challenges, estate planning for collections, and fiduciary duties in art transactions — not just theory, but the deal points and due diligence steps practitioners actually use.
A cross-professional network of attorneys, museum leaders, collectors, advisors, artists, and finance professionals — built through daily Practitioner Roundtables, shared site visits, and four days of learning in the same room.
Behind-the-scenes access to the institutions and companies at the center of these debates — not as a tourist, but as a professional invited into the conversation.
A Berkeley Law Certificate of Participation in the Art, Law, and Finance Intensive Seminar (see Credential and CLE Credit section below for details).
Program Structure
How to Apply
Contacts
For further inquiries, CONTACT US
Berkeley Art, Law, and Finance Project
Berkeley Center for Law and Business
UC Berkeley School of Law
Email: artlaw@berkeley.edu Web: law.berkeley.edu/research/
The University of California, Berkeley is committed to diversity and welcomes applications from all qualified individuals. Program details are subject to change.
