Stacey Jessiman de Nanteuil has joined the JFK Law team to help us better serve First Nations, Indigenous persons and other organizations and individuals seeking solutions for their economic development, business and cultural heritage aspirations. Stacey’s work in business law and dispute resolution and experience in the field of art and cultural heritage protection and repatriation give her a unique set of skills and insights into this work.
Stacey has practiced as a dispute resolution and corporate/commercial law attorney at Salans LLP in Paris and Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York. She helped clients in a variety of sectors resolve complex international commercial disputes through arbitration and mediation. As a corporate and commercial attorney she assisted Fortune 500 companies with mergers and acquisitions and securities issuances, handled the corporate aspects of a leading Canadian insurance company’s demutualization, and worked as in-house counsel for a start-up B2B e-commerce company. For many years, she assisted a French global fashion house with its retail business in Asia. She also acted as counsel for several human rights and arts-related non-profit organizations.
In addition, Stacey has extensive experience in the field of cultural heritage law and dispute resolution. Her work focuses on helping clients analyze and deal sensitively with the complex legal, ethical, historical, cultural, financial and organizational issues that underlie and affect their business relationships and disputes, including local and international legal and ethical frameworks and parties’ values, goals and imperatives. Through her work she has developed a specific dispute resolution process for disputes involving Indigenous cultural heritage. She also has developed and taught innovative courses at Stanford University that examine and compare complex issues surrounding illicit trade in art and cultural heritage around the world and explore means of strengthening and implementing tribal, domestic and international legal and ethical frameworks for indigenous heritage protection and repatriation, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Through interviews and performances that she filmed, her courses bring into the classroom the voices and perspectives of renowned Indigenous and museum experts from Canada and globally.
Stacey holds BA degrees in Art History (Hons) and International Relations from Stanford University, a Juris Doctor from the University of Toronto, and an LLM degree from the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. Prior to attending law school, Stacey worked at the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution in England. She has completed advanced mediation training at Harvard Law School and has designed and led Alternative Dispute Resolution seminars for the Canadian Bar Association and several law firms. From 2012-2014, Stacey was a Visiting Student Researcher at the Stanford Archaeology Center. During this time she lectured at the Center on cultural heritage issues and completed her LLM thesis entitled “Understanding and resolving cultural heritage repatriation disputes between Indigenous peoples and museums”. Stacey is a frequent speaker at international conferences on cultural heritage and dispute resolution issues, including the University of Geneva International Cultural Heritage Law Summer School.
Stacey’s recent publications include Understanding and Resolving Indigenous Cultural Heritage Repatriation Disputes (forthcoming, UBC Press); “Object and Spirit Agency: The G’psgolox Poles as Mediators Within and Between Colonized and Colonizer Cultures” in Paul Basu (ed) The In-betweenness of Things: Materializing Mediation and Movement Between Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2017); “Challenges for implementing UNESCO’s HUL Recommendation in Canada” in Sophia Labadi and William Logan (eds) Urban Heritage, Development and Sustainability: International Frameworks, National and Local Governance (Routledge, 2015); “The Edgy State of Decolonization at the Canadian Museum of History”, UBC Law Journal special issue (2014); and “The Repatriation of the G’psgolox Totem Pole: A Study of its Context, Process and Outcome”, International Journal of Cultural Property (2011) 18:365-91.
Stacey is a member of the New York Bar. She is currently in the process of becoming licensed to practice law in Ontario and British Columbia.
She is also a member of the American Bar Association; the International Bar Association; the National Native American Bar Association; the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (Co-Chair, Advocacy Committee); the Canadian Law and Society Association; the Canadian Anthropology Society; the Canadian Museums Association; the American Alliance of Museums; the American Anthropological Association; and the Socio-Legal Studies Association (UK).