Summer movie spotlights USC law professor’s success


For lawyer Randy Schoenberg, the Hollywood movie summer success Woman In Gold — which tells his story of how he helped a Jewish refugee sue the Austrian government and recover Nazi-looted artwork — is simply “icing on the cake.”

“It was winning the case that was the big deal,” said Schoenberg, who graduated from the Gould School of Law in 1991. Since suing the Austrian government, Schoenberg has turned his focus to his alma mater, twice suing the university and presently teaching a “Art and Cultural Property Law” course at the Gould School.

The Woman In Gold chronicles Schoenberg’s remarkable success recovering Nazi-looted art that had been in the Austrian government’s possession since Maria Altmann fled at the outbreak of WWII.

Altmann came to Schoenberg in 1998 to get his help in recovering six Gustav Klimt paintings that the Nazis had seized as a part of their persecution of the Jews in the lead up to WWII. Schoenberg said he was quite eager to help Altmann, who was Schoenberg’s grandmother’s closest friend.

In fact, Schoenberg clearly recalls the first time he learned of the connection between his family friend and the famous painting. As a teenager he went to the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna and saw the painting — referred to as the “Mona Lisa of Austria” — in person.

“I remember my mother showing me the painting and saying, ‘You know your grandmother’s friend, Maria Altmann? That’s her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer,’” Schoenberg said. “I knew the painting, but I hadn’t even known that her family had owned the painting.”

The case had even greater personal significance, as Schoenberg’s great grandfather and dozens of other family members died in the Holocaust. His entire family had resided in Vienna before WWII, when his grandfather, famous composer Arnold Schoenberg, fled to America. Arnold’s first job in California was teaching music at USC.

After digging deep into the wills of both Adele and her husband Ferdinand, Schoenberg’s research proved that the art was taken illegally and that Ferdinand’s will — a valid and legally binding document — had left the art to Altmann and her sister, the couple’s only living heirs at the time of Ferdinand’s death.

When the law firm he worked for decided not to pull forward with the case, Schoenberg decided to quit his job and take the case on a contingency fee.

“There’s never any good time to make that type of huge career change to leave a big firm and go out on your own. But it was the next step in my life,” he said.

The case remained stalled, however, because the Austrian government refused to acknowledge the paintings were illegally stolen and put in the Belvedere gallery.

“[The Austrian government] just couldn’t put themselves in the position of what it would be like to the victim,” he said. “[It was so frustrating] because here is this chance for you — the Austrians of present society who didn’t do anything wrong during the war — to make the right choice. And yet you’re still perpetuating the bad decisions of the past.”

After exhausting all options in Austria, Schoenberg found a loophole that allowed him to sue the Austrian government in the United States court system. The case ended up going to the Supreme Court as the Republic of Austria v. Altmann in 2004.

The court ruled in Schoenberg and Altmann’s favor, essentially authorizing Altmann to move forward with a civil action against Austria in the U.S. federal court.

In an attempt to save time and energy, Schoenberg made a deal with the Austrian government to agree to an arbitration panel in Austria that finally decided in 2006 that the paintings were to be returned to Altmann and her family. Since then, the painting has been on display in Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York City.

Despite the extremely positive outcome, Schoenberg had never really counted on winning the case.

“[The case] was fun to talk about at cocktail parties, but everyone thought I was tilting at windmills and that it was completely insane. And it was, but sometimes those things pay off, and I was very lucky that it did,” he said.

For the most part the film was quite accurate, Schoenberg said — except for the fact that Reynolds was named “People’s Sexiest Man Alive,” whereas Schoenberg has never particularly imagined himself that way.

For example, while Schoenberg’s wife did not go into labor as he was packing for his Supreme Court hearing, he did receive a call 36 hours before heading into the Supreme Court that his wife had been admitted to the hospital for preterm labor, he said.

Prior to his big case, Schoenberg got practice filing suits against big institutions when he sued his alma mater twice in 1995.

“I graduated from there, and then I sued them,” Schoenberg said.

 

The first case was personal to his family history. In 1995, USC was home to the Arnold Schoenberg Institute. However, in February 1995, the University approached the Schoenberg family to modify their contract, which would force the family to decrease their involvement in the center and relinquish control over the copyrights, Schoenberg said. Schoenberg sued the university and obtained two publicized preliminary injunctions that prohibited the school from using the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in violation of its agreement with the family’s heirs.

Schoenberg sued USC again the same year when football player Israel Ifeanyi was suspended by the NCAA for four games after he accepted money from his Nigerian tribe, Schoenberg said.

Ifeanyi had appealed his suspension, and was meant to have his hearing the Wednesday before the big USC-Notre Dame game. However, the NCAA cancelled the appeal last minute so that Ifeanyi would not have the chance to argue his case to play in the big game. Schoenberg sued the university and obtained a temporary restraining order against the NCAA that allowed Ifeanyi to play in the USC-Notre Dame game.

Even though he was technically suing the University, Schoenberg said it worked out in their best interest.

“For USC, my recollection is that they sort of wanted us to sue them. They had to be on the NCAA’s side, but they really wanted him to play,” he said.

Now teaching at USC, Schoenberg is passing down what he learned at his alma mater to his current students. Former student Stephanie Myer, who graduated from the Gould School in May, said that Schoenberg was “very open about the fact that he isn’t really an art lawyer.”

“He would always say, ‘It’s kind of funny that USC asked me to teach this class because I didn’t study [art law] in school, and I didn’t try to do this… It just kind of happened,’” Myer said.

Schoenberg said this is something he learned during his own time as a law student from USC’s interdisciplinary approach.

“A good lawyer is able to pick up and go wherever the client needs him or her. And that’s how USC prepared me and the rest of us for that kind of practice.”

Myer took Schoenberg’s class because it related to her focus in entertainment law. Right before the class began, the trailer for Woman in Gold came out.

“A friend of mine had posted it on Facebook, and I looked it up and was like, ‘Wait, that’s my teacher,’” she said. “He was so funny about [the film]. He was like, ‘Obviously I’m not Ryan Reynolds,’” and he casually left for a week in the semester to go to the movie’s premieres.”

After watching the film, Myer said that it was very exciting to see her professor’s real-world accomplishments on the big screen.

“I felt like I knew the real story, so it was cool to watch Hollywood’s take on it,” she said.