Stephen Urice

Stephen K. Urice (born February 12, 1950), Director of the Project for Cultural Heritage Law & Policy, is an internationally recognized expert in cultural property law and a former trusts and estates practitioner.

An archaeologist and an attorney, Urice is now a tenured member of the law faculty at the University of Miami School of Law. Previously he served as a lecturer at University of Pennsylvania Law School for several years and previously taught at UCLA Law School. In 2003, Urice served as a visiting lecturer of public and international affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, teaching a seminar on the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.

Urice’s doctoral dissertation formed the basis of his book, Qasr Kharana in the Transjordan (1987), which presented the findings of his work as director of a Jordanian-American archaeological expedition at that early Islamic site. On completing his doctorate in 1981, Urice entered Harvard Law School. He graduated with the Class of ’84 and began his legal practice in the Trusts and Estates department of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy in New York. Three years later, he moved to Los Angeles where he joined the trusts and estates department at Irell & Manella. Urice left the practice of law in 1991 to serve as acting director of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in Los Angeles.