On the Lotus: Stories of International Law - Professor Valentin Jeutner
Returning to micro-objects such as the Lotus postcards is not a departure from international law but a way of looking at it more closely. A seminar with Professor Valentin Jeutner.
Love letters, travel updates, expressions of grief, boredom, excitement, and longing: the talk introduces a recently published book which brings together more than 150 postcards written by passengers aboard the Lotus, a French liner that connected Marseille with the great ports of the eastern Mediterranean between 1898 and 1931. Written by pilgrims and poets, soldiers and scholars, royals and revolutionaries, the messages offer rare glimpses into everyday life during one of the most transformative periods of modern history. The book is freely available at: https://archive.org/details/on-the-lotus/mode/2up
In this talk I ask: why should international lawyers care about a stack of ordinary postcards? None of the cards mention the 1926 collision, the France-Turkey dispute, or the doctrine of flag-state jurisdiction that made the Lotus Case famous. Read from a doctrinal perspective, they offer little. But engaging with them as international lawyers is worthwhile precisely because they do something doctrine cannot: they restore a sense of time, space, and human stakes to a principle we often encounter as timeless and placeless.
The postcards sharpen our sense of the Lotus Principle's age and the specific geopolitical world, a Europe and Mediterranean reshaped by the First World War, in which it emerged. They also sharpen our awareness of our own positionality as readers of international law, prompting us to imagine the case through the eyes of stokers, pilgrims, sex workers, and soldiers, not only judges and diplomats. Above all, they reveal the contingency of legal norms: like the postcards themselves, the Lotus Principle was made by particular people, at a particular moment. I argue that returning to micro-objects such as the Lotus postcards is not a departure from international law but a way of looking at it more closely.
About the speaker:
Valentin Jeutner is Professor of International Law at Lund University and Retained Lecturer in Law at Pembroke College, Oxford. His research explores foundational questions of international law and its intersections with philosophy, theology, technology, art and history. At Lund, he directs the Master’s Programme in International Human Rights Law and coordinates the Museum of International Law, an initiative that uses objects and material culture to make international law tangible and accessible. His books include The Reasonable Person: A Legal Biography (CUP 2024), The Sovereign Human Being (Bloomsbury 2024), and The Aesthetic Authority of Law (2025). He is admitted to the New York Bar.