According to the passage, Burke envisaged the most formidable potential adversaries of his country's museums in recla...

Emil-Kunkin on January 31, 2022

Hi Jing Jing,

We are being asked who Burke, the respected museum director whose view is cited in the first paragraph, would consider to be the most formidable plaintiffs in trying to reclaim stolen art. Given the fact that Burke does not explicitly say who he would find to be the single toughest opponent, this presents a challenge. I would start by re-reading the first paragraph to understand Burke's argument.

Looking at line 19, we do get a glimpse into what Burke would consider to be a formidable legal challenge to ownership of art. He posits that any country could enact a patrimony law that would declare any art made at any time in its history to be the property of the country. Burke then notes that this could become ruinously expensive for museums to defend against.

Since Burke explicitly calls out the idea of foreign governments reclaiming their artifacts and art, and notes that it would be extremely expensive for museums, we can conclude that he considers foreign governments to be a formidable potential plaintiff.

Notably, when we look at the answer choices we see that A, B, D, and E are not mentioned by Burke as potential opponents, while C is explicitly called out. We can safely conclude that C is correct.