What rules do the Nobel Foundation statutes actually contain regarding ownership and disposition of medals and prize money?
Executive summary
The statutes of the Nobel Foundation make the legal award — the title and recognition of “laureate” — inseparable from the named recipient and non-transferable, while imposing no statutory restriction on what a laureate may physically do with a medal, diploma, or prize money; procedural rules about award decisions, sharing and confidentiality are also codified [1] [2] [3]. Reporting and institutional statements converge on three practical limits: the honour cannot be reassigned, prizes may be shared only under set rules, and certain procedural protections (including a 50‑year secrecy rule) apply to award deliberations [4] [5] [6].
1. The award as an inseparable honour, not a transferable commodity
The Nobel bodies repeatedly stress that the “prize” — meaning the honour and recognition recorded in history — remains inseparably linked to the person or organisation designated by the awarding committee; that official status cannot be transferred or reassigned even if the medal or diploma changes hands [2] [1]. Contemporary coverage of high‑profile gifted or auctioned medals (for example, recent cases reported by Reuters and Time) underscores that handing over a medal does not change the historical record of who is the laureate [2] [7].
2. No statutory bar on disposing of the physical medal, diploma or money
The Nobel Foundation’s public guidance and statements from prize bodies explicitly say the statutes contain no restrictions on what a laureate may do with the medal, the diploma, or the prize money — a laureate may give away, sell or otherwise dispose of those physical items without contravening the statutes [1] [2]. Modern precedent is clear: several laureates or their heirs have sold or donated medals, and auctions and donations have been accepted and recorded [7] [8].
3. Limits set in other ways: sharing rules, refusals, and reversion of funds
While physical items can be disposed of, the statutes set limits on who may be recorded as a laureate and how prizes are divided: a Nobel Prize may be awarded to up to three individuals (or an organisation, for Peace), and the statutes govern that division [5] [3]. Historical practice also shows that if a laureate declines or refuses the prize, the official record may note that refusal while the money can revert to the funds after specified procedures — a point reflected in historical summaries and the Foundation’s interpretation of Nobel’s will [5] [3].
4. Procedural protections: finality of awards and secrecy of deliberations
The statutes make decisions of prize‑awarding bodies effectively final — there is no appeal against an award decision — and they preserve confidentiality about nominations and deliberations for at least 50 years after an award, limiting external legal or public contestation of ownership questions related to the award’s assignment [9] [6]. Those procedural clauses functionally cement the laureate’s status regardless of subsequent disposal of the physical trappings [3].
5. How institutions and media frame the same text differently
Institutional communications (the Nobel Foundation and Norwegian Nobel Committee) emphasize that the statutes do not restrict disposition of medals or funds, a framing that defuses questions about recent medal gifts and sales [1] [2]. News outlets and commentators stress the symbolic versus material split — headlines highlight auctions and gifts while noting legal non‑transferability — which can create public confusion about what “ownership” of a medal actually means in law versus symbolism [7] [4].
6. Reporting gaps and limits of available sources
Primary statutory text and official FAQs establish the core rules, but the provided sources do not supply the verbatim statutory paragraphs on every procedural detail (for instance, exact clauses about reversion of prize money after refusal are summarized in historical reporting rather than quoted line‑by‑line in the sources provided) — the account here therefore relies on official summaries and reputable reporting where the full statutory text is not reproduced in the cited snippets [3] [5].