§ 338.2.Action For Damages, Etc. For Artwork Or Personal Property Taken Due to Political Persecution

Section 338.2, enacted in 2024, gives a California resident — or an heir, trustee, assignee, or representative of that resident’s estate — a path to recover artwork or other listed categories of personal property taken or lost through political persecution, meaning persecution of a group based on membership in a class protected by the Unruh Civil Rights Act. The action must be brought within six years of the claimant’s or their agent’s actual discovery of both the property’s identity and whereabouts and facts sufficient to support a possessory claim to it.

A claimant who already knew those facts before the section’s enactment gets whichever is later of six years from that discovery or two years from the enactment date. The section forecloses the defenses a current possessor might otherwise raise — good-faith acquisition, acquisitive prescription, adverse possession, and laches all fall away for property taken through political persecution — and a prevailing plaintiff recovers reasonable attorney’s fees and costs. A separate, narrower revival window lets claimants whose earlier suits were dismissed on one of those now-barred defenses (or on procedural grounds like standing or jurisdiction) refile within two years of the section’s effective date or of a final judgment terminating the earlier case, whichever is later.