The legal backstory to an auction of a cloth bag containing lunar dust from the Apollo 11 mission, which fetched $1.8 million on Thursday, “is a pretty cool case,” said the lawyer who won it.

Christopher McHugh of Kansas City's Seigfreid Bingham said what made the matter fascinating—beyond how it stemmed from Neil Armstrong's first scoops of material on the Moon—was that it played out across criminal and civil law in courts in Illinois, Kansas and Texas.

He got involved when he received a cold call from a woman in Chicago, Nancy Lee Carlson, herself a transactional lawyer.