| Abstrakt: |
Integrity—the ability of a resource to communicate its historic significance—is a physical concern for heritage conservation practitioners. But it is also a legal concept, integral to binding judgments that determine whether and how certain resources are protected. Focusing on US law, this essay articulates the contours of integrity both before and after a resource is designated historic. The essay begins by exploring scholarly critiques of the designation process, which requires resources to demonstrate integrity and which, as a result, tends to bar certain types of resources from designation. It then identifies integrity issues that arise in three post-designation legal contexts: laws imposing obligations on public actors, laws imposing obligations on private actors, and laws conferring benefits on private actors. In these laws, integrity is essential to the legal obligation itself, and it is treated as formally as it is during the designation process. The essay concludes that integrity, as a legal concept, may be more complicated, and more difficult to dislodge, than current scholarship suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
