Your first litigation assignment is to draft a Complaint to recover a sculpture that has been “missing” for sixty years. The cause of action is the ancient writ of replevin. You are an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Portland, Maine, and your client is the United States of America and its agency, the U.S. Department of Labor. Your assignment arrives in the form of the following memo from the Chief of the Civil Division.

MEMORANDUM

To: Assistant U.S. Attorney, Civil Division

Fr: Bill Browder, Civil Chief

Re: United States v. Melody Richardson

I recently received a phone call from the U.S. Department of Labor that we need to stop the sale of a sculpture that is about to be auctioned in Portland. The sculpture is “Boothbay Falcon” by William Summers. Its estimated value is $50,000.

The Chief of the Labor Department's Fine Arts Program, Alicia Diebenkorn, says that the sculpture belongs to the federal government and that the seller is not the rightful owner. It's your job to recover the sculpture on behalf of the federal government. I want you to draft a Complaint right away.

Alicia discovered the sculpture when she saw it listed in an auction catalog. The catalog represents that the sculpture includes a label that refers to the “Labor Department Art Project.” According to Alicia, that label means the sculpture was originally commissioned by the federal government back in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Alicia did some research at the National Archives in Washington and found documents from the 1930s that indicate that this particular sculpture was indeed commissioned by the federal government as part of something called the “Labor Department Art Project.