Supreme Court orders lower court to reconsider case over Nazi stolen art

The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a lower court to reconsider its ruling in a case from California involving an impressionist painting stolen by Nazis during World War II.

The justices told a lower court in an unsigned order to reconsider the dispute over a Camille Pissarro painting that a Holocaust-era family says was stolen by the Nazis and now is on display in a museum in Madrid. A recently enacted California law protects access to and the return of artwork from the Holocaust.

Before the law was enacted, a lower court judge had ruled that said Spanish law applies. And the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reasoned that the painting was transferred to Spanish ownership over the years.

The Supreme Court’s order reverses that decision.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Cassirer family brought the case in 2005 after the Spanish museum would not return it.

The family said it had hung in their Berlin apartment in 1939.