US House Passes Expanded HEAR Act, Aiming to Clear Procedural Hurdles in Nazi-Era Art Restitution
A long-running frustration in Nazi-era restitution cases is not only proving what happened, but getting a court to hear the dispute at all. On March 16, the US House of Representatives voted to broaden the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act of 2025, legislation designed to make it easier for families to pursue claims for artworks lost or stolen during the Nazi era. The measure had already cleared the Senate and now awaits President Donald Trump’s signature.
If enacted, the bill would reshape the litigation terrain for claimants and for current holders of contested works, including private collectors, dealers, and museums. Its central promise is straightforward: fewer cases decided on procedural grounds, and more decided on the merits.
The new bill builds on the HEAR Act of 2016, which addressed a basic problem in restitution: time limits. Under the 2016 law, claimants received a six-year statute of limitations that begins only when they have “actual knowledge” of both their claim to a work and the work’s current location. Because that clock can start decades after a wartime taking, the law effectively reopened the courthouse door for some families whose claims would otherwise have been time-barred.
Yet the record of recoveries under the 2016 framework has been thin. According to the account accompanying the new legislation, only one civil case that cited the HEAR Act resulted in a court order requiring a current owner to return art to claimants: Reif v. Nagy. Many other efforts stalled because defendants successfully invoked procedural doctrines that prevented judges from reaching the underlying history.
The HEAR Act of 2025 aims to make the 2016 statute of limitations permanent and to neutralize several of those “technical defenses.” Among the most consequential is laches, a doctrine that can block recovery when a court finds that a claimant waited too long to sue and that the delay unfairly prejudiced the current holder. In practice, laches has often turned on the realities of archival loss: after generations, witnesses are gone, documents are incomplete, and provenance trails can be fragmentary.
The bill also targets other doctrines that have complicated restitution suits in US courts, including the act of state doctrine, which generally discourages US judges from second-guessing a foreign sovereign’s acts within its own territory, and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which can shield foreign states from being sued.
Even with those changes, the legislation is not a guarantee of successful claims. Courts have repeatedly emphasized that missing evidence can make it impossible to reconstruct the circumstances of a sale, transfer, or seizure with the specificity required by modern pleading standards. As the analysis around the bill notes, legislation cannot restore what the historical record no longer contains.
The bill’s limits are also visible in previously litigated disputes. In Zuckerman v. Metropolitan Museum of Art, claimants argued that a sale was made under duress. While the appellate court rejected the claim on laches grounds — a path the 2025 act would seek to close — the case also involved a lower-court dismissal for failure to adequately allege duress. In other words, even a world without laches would not necessarily have changed the outcome.
What happens next will likely be decided as much in courtrooms as in conference rooms. The legislation is already prompting constitutional arguments, and its practical impact may be partly hidden: the prospect of a more claimant-friendly framework could encourage private, out-of-court settlements that never become public.
Still, the stakes are clear. By attempting to move Nazi-era restitution disputes away from procedural traps and toward factual adjudication, the expanded HEAR Act marks one of the most significant shifts in US policy on Holocaust-era art claims in a generation — and one that museums, dealers, and collectors will be watching closely as the first cases test its reach.
