Legal Laundering: How Lex Rei Sitae Risks Locking In the Stolen Louvre Jewels

Introduction

On 19 October 2025, headlines around the world reported a heist that seemed scripted for cinema. In just under seven minutes, four thieves in high-visibility vests and helmets rode a truck-mounted furniture lift up to a second-floor window of the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, cut through the glass with power tools, and smashed open display cases before fleeing with eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels worth an estimated €88 million (about $102 million) [1]. In the weeks since, French authorities have opened a large organized-crime investigation and arrested multiple suspects in France and at Charles de Gaulle Airport [2]. Nevertheless, the jewels themselves remain at large [3].

In this article, I will focus on what disappeared behind the glass: eight Napoleonic-era pieces from the French Crown Jewels, including an imperial crown, diamond-encrusted insignia of the Légion d’honneur, and ceremonial ornaments commissioned under Napoleon III and long exhibited in the Galerie d’Apollon as emblems of French statehood and power [4]. It then proposes that from a legal perspective, what makes the Louvre heist particularly troubling for the French government is not only the theft itself, but what has likely happened since 19 October. Investigators and jewellery experts widely fear that the stolen pieces will be dismantled: large historic stones removed from their mounts, gold settings melted for bullion, and individual gems repolished or recut to erase distinguishing features [5]. This practice makes later identification — and, by extension, restitution — extremely difficult [6].

There is also every reason to think the jewels will not remain in France. French police have already alerted colleagues in traditional jewellery-trafficking hubs such as Antwerp, whose dense cluster of wholesalers and small shops has long served both the licit diamond trade and a shadow market in stolen stones. High-value loot from across Europe regularly moves to the city to be “fenced” and laundered into legitimate commerce [7]. Once the Louvre jewels are quietly sold in another state, any future attempt to recover them will force a court to decide which country’s property law applies to questions of ownership, good-faith purchase, and limitation periods. For this article, a good-faith purchaser is a buyer who acquires an object without knowing, and without reasonably being expected to know, that it is stolen; limitation periods are the legal deadlines after which a claim can no longer be brought. Determining which country’s rules govern these issues is a classic “choice-of-law” problem in private international law — that is, the branch of law that tells courts which state’s legal system should apply when a dispute is connected to more than one country [8].

I will analyze the Louvre jewel theft through the lens of lex rei sitae, the traditional choice-of-law rule under which ownership disputes over cultural objects are governed by “the law of the place where the thing is located” at the relevant time [9]. In France — as in many European jurisdictions — lex rei sitae remains the default “connecting factor” for determining which law applies to restitution claims, with French courts generally favoring the law of the object’s location on the day the claim is brought [10]. Building on recent scholarship showing how strict adherence to lex rei sitae in art-theft cases can encourage “forum-shopping” — the strategic movement of objects or litigation to jurisdictions whose laws are more favorable to one side — and can facilitate the laundering of looted works through countries that strongly protect good-faith purchasers [11], I will advance two claims about the doctrine’s shortcomings.

First, I will argue that given the extraordinary portability of the stolen jewels and the likelihood that they will be trafficked into markets whose private-law regimes are more favorable to purchasers than to dispossessed owners, applying lex rei sitae as it is currently understood in French private international law may well prevent France from recovering the jewels even if they are eventually located. Second, I will show that even if one assumes that this particular case could be resolved in France’s favor, the logic of the heist exposes a deeper structural flaw: lex rei sitae effectively allows criminal actors to determine which legal order will govern title to stolen cultural property simply by moving it into jurisdictions with more generous rules for good-faith acquisition. In doing so, the doctrine weakens deterrence and leaves legal regimes for cultural property structurally one step behind organized theft.

A Brief History of lex rei sitae

Lex rei sitae — literally, “the law of the place where the thing is located” — is a basic rule of private international law that says questions about who owns a piece of property, and how title to it is transferred, are governed by the law of the country where that property is situated [12]. Originally developed for land (immovable property), the same logic has gradually been extended in most legal systems to movable things as well, including artworks and jewels: courts treat cultural objects “like any other object” for conflict-of-laws purposes, and apply the law of the place where they are located when ownership is disputed [13]. This lex rei sitae rule is almost universally accepted because it offers a simple, territorially anchored way to choose the governing law in complex cross-border cases [14].

In France, the principle is rooted in Article 3 of the Code Civil, which codifies that immovables located on French territory are governed by French law. Since the nineteenth century, French courts have extended the same territorial logic to movables [15]. In practice, French judges therefore tend to apply the law of the object’s location — la loi de la situation du bien — to restitution claims involving cultural property, whether the object is in France (in which case French law applies) or abroad (in which case the foreign law of the situs applies) [16]. Recent commentary on French and European practice notes that, for cultural objects, lex rei sitae is usually understood as the law of the place where the object stood at the time of the last transaction or at the time the claim was brought, which can be decisive for whether a good-faith purchaser is protected or an original owner can recover the work [17].

The main justification for lex rei sitae is legal certainty. Property is deeply tied to territory: the state where an object is physically located has the strongest interest in supervising transactions, protecting buyers and creditors, and enforcing judgments. Applying the law of that state is thought to make outcomes more predictable for market participants and courts, and to avoid the chaos that would result if multiple property regimes competed over the same object [18]. At the same time, I will argue in the sections that follow, the apparent neutrality of lex rei sitae can have troubling side effects: because thieves can move objects into jurisdictions that favor good-faith purchasers, strict reliance on the rule may unintentionally facilitate the laundering of stolen art and antiquities through hospitable legal systems. Thus, I suggest that the application of lex rei sitae in the Louvre case may well mean that France will never get its crown jewels back.

France’s Public-Domain Regime and Title to the Louvre Jewels

Before I can explain why lex rei sitae is uniquely problematic for the French government in the case of the stolen Louvre jewels, I must first set out what French property law says about who owns them. If, even under France’s own internal rules, the French State could not demand their return from a future possessor in France, then the transnational choice-of-law questions that follow would be largely beside the point. My claim in this section is the opposite: under French law, the Louvre jewels occupy an exceptionally protected category that confers on the State a particularly strong and enduring title.

What makes the Louvre jewels legally unusual is that, in French law, they are not just expensive pieces of private property. They belong to the French State and form part of the official collections of a musée de France. That status grants special legal status under the domaine public mobilier — literally, the public movable domain. Under this status, the law deems the jewels both inalienable, in that they cannot be sold off like an ordinary asset, and imprescriptible: the State does not lose ownership simply because a long time passes [19]. Additionally, these collection pieces are classified as trésors nationaux — national treasures — so their export is tightly controlled and any attempt to move them out of France triggers an additional layer of legal protection [20].

French courts have consistently applied this public-domain regime to cultural objects claimed by the State. Since at least Cousin v. de Maillé et de la Liste civile (Cour de cassation, 10 August 1841) (“Cousin”), the case law has treated royal furnishings and similar objects as belonging to the State’s public domain and therefore not freely alienable. In Cousin, an attempt by a member of the nobility to treat royal furniture as private property was rejected on the ground that such items, once incorporated into the Crown’s patrimony, could not be validly sold off or appropriated by private parties [21]. More recently, trial courts have extended the same logic to items in national collections: in 2015, the Tribunal de grande instance of Paris held that a Louis XVI desk listed in the Mobilier national inventory formed part of the State’s domaine public mobilier and ordered its restitution, stressing inalienability and imprescriptibility [22], and a porcelain vase belonging to the Cité de la céramique–Sèvres et Limoges was similarly returned on the ground that it belonged to the national collections [23]. Taken together, these decisions show that once an object is recognised as part of a public collection and can be identified in the relevant inventory or classification acts, the State’s right of revendication — its right to reclaim its property — is effectively perpetual; any protection for a good-faith purchaser is channelled, if at all, into compensation rather than ownership.

Per these rules, the French government does not lose title to a crown or a jewelled order insignia just because it has been missing for decades or because it has passed through the hands of multiple innocent buyers. For the purposes of my argument, this matters enormously: if the Louvre jewels ever reappear in France, domestic law would require that they be returned to the State. The harder question — and the focus of the rest of my analysis — is what happens when, under lex rei sitae, another country’s law is chosen instead.

How lex rei sitae Blocks the Louvre Jewels’ Return

Even if French law gives the State a uniquely strong and enduring title to the Louvre jewels, that is only half the story — and in this case, it is the less important half. Because the financial and symbolic stakes are so immense, the thieves have every incentive to move the jewels into jurisdictions whose laws are structurally friendly to good-faith purchasers. Once the jewels are moved abroad and sold in another market, any future restitution claim will almost inevitably be filtered through lex rei sitae. In most legal systems, the default conflict rule for movable property is lex rei sitae, and it is often combined with domestic rules that allow good-faith purchasers to acquire title even to stolen objects [25]. Jurisdictions such as Italy, Switzerland, Belgium (particularly via Antwerp’s diamond trade), and, in some contexts, the United States, all contain mechanisms by which an innocent buyer can eventually obtain secure title to stolen movables. This combination can systematically favor market stability over restitution and enable what I will call “legal laundering” of cultural objects: once a thief succeeds in filtering the jewels through a jurisdiction with generous protection for good-faith buyers, the French State’s claim may be not just weakened but permanently foreclosed [26].

In the case of the stolen Louvre jewels, lex rei sitae is not just inconvenient for the French government; it is disastrous, as it may prevent France from ever recovering the jewels even if they are located. The classic illustration is Winkworth v. Christie, Manson & Woods Ltd. A collection of Japanese netsuke was stolen from an English owner, taken to Italy, and sold there to an apparently innocent purchaser. Years later, when the objects resurfaced at auction in London, the original owner sued for their return. Under English law, the thief could never have passed good title, and the claimant would have succeeded. But the English court held that the validity of the transfer was governed by Italian law — the law of the place where the goods were located when they were sold. Under Italian civil law, a purchaser in good faith can acquire good title to movables, even if they were stolen. Applying lex rei sitae, the court therefore recognized the Italian buyer’s title and dismissed the English owner’s claim, despite the fact that the objects had physically returned to England [27]. This is precisely the dynamic that matters in the Louvre case: once cultural objects are trafficked into a jurisdiction that protects good-faith purchasers, lex rei sitae can effectively “lock in” that transfer against later claims by the original owner state.

A similar pattern appears in Stato francese v. Ministero per i beni culturali ed ambientali e De Contessini (“Stato francese”), involving two tapestries stolen from a French state institution, moved to Italy, and bought there by a local antiquarian. Italian courts again applied Italian law as the lex rei sitae and held that the good-faith purchaser had become the owner — even though, under French law, the tapestries formed part of the inalienable public domain [28]. In both cases, once the law of the market state was selected as the law of the situs, the more protective rules of the claimant state simply never entered the analysis. Moreover, the case of Stato francese is particularly illustrative given the fact the two tapestries were French public property — just like the crown jewels.

If we transpose these dynamics to the Louvre jewels, the risk is clear. France’s internal law treats the crown jewels as inalienable, imprescriptible elements of the domaine public mobilier, and as trésors nationaux that should never definitively leave the national patrimony. But if the stolen pieces are dismantled and sold in a jurisdiction whose law protects good-faith purchasers after a period of time and if a future court applies that law as the lex rei sitae, the buyer’s title will be recognized and France’s public-domain rules will fall out of the analysis. Therefore, I argue that lex rei sitae will keep the Louvre jewels from ever coming back.

Beyond the Louvre: Structural Effects of Lex Rei Sitae on Art Theft and Trafficking

It should not be forgotten that the Louvre heist is an extreme test case for lex rei sitae because the stakes are unusually high financially, symbolically, and politically. My argument is complicated by the fact that precisely because the theft is so public, any foreign government that openly refused to return the jewels if they were found on its territory would likely face intense scrutiny from the press, civil society, and other states. If the jewels are discovered, they may be returned as a matter of political or moral judgment, regardless of what lex rei sitae would dictate. Contemporary debates over the Parthenon marbles and Nazi-looted artworks show how powerful public and diplomatic pressure can be in shaping restitution outcomes, even where formal legal rules are ambiguous or restrictive [29].

Nevertheless, the Louvre case exposes a broader structural problem with lex rei sitae as the default rule when cultural objects are trafficked. On the sellers’ side, traffickers can increase the chances of pulling off a successful sale simply by steering objects toward markets where good-faith purchasers are strongly protected and where courts are inclined to prioritize transactional security over restitution. Because the doctrine directs courts to apply the law of the place where the object is last located, traffickers can treat the globe as a menu of legal options, moving objects into jurisdictions whose rules on prescription, good-faith acquisition, or evidentiary burdens are most advantageous to them. In this sense, lex rei sitae does not merely describe the legal consequences of trafficking after the fact; it helps structure traffickers’ ex ante strategy by making it rational to “park” stolen objects in friendly legal environments [30].

On the buyers’ side, the prospect of eventual legal protection can dull incentives to investigate provenance carefully. Rigorous due diligence is still far from universal, and some market participants are willing to rely on the assumption that, if they buy through reputable intermediaries, obtain a plausible paper trail, or simply wait out limitation periods, the law will ultimately shield them from loss [30]. When buyers know — or believe — that a legal system will prioritize the stability of transactions and the protection of good-faith purchasers, the marginal benefit of probing awkward gaps in an object’s history decreases. Taken together, this combination — the mobility of cultural objects, the diversity of national property laws, and a choice-of-law rule that defers to the law of the last market — creates a systematic “demand pull” for looted art and antiquities, because it lowers the long-term legal risk for both traffickers and purchasers [31].

Seen from this angle, the Louvre theft is not only a dramatic one-off event but a sharp illustration of how lex rei sitae can shape incentives. It’s not to say that the doctrine caused the theft, but that it systematically structures the strategic landscape in which thieves decide where to send the jewels and in which buyers decide how much they need to know. In a case where the objects are world-famous French state jewels, public outrage and diplomatic pressure might still push a foreign government to cooperate with France. Yet the very fact that the thieves may try to “legally launder” the jewels through jurisdictions that favor good-faith purchasers underscores the central claim of this article: as long as lex rei sitae remains the default connecting factor, the law itself helps create the conditions that make high-end cultural-property trafficking both imaginable and potentially profitable.

Footnotes

[1] Jennifer Hassan, Leo Sands, and Sammy Westfall, “Thieves Steal Treasured Jewelry from Louvre in 7-Minute Daylight Heist,” Washington Post, October 19, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/10/19/louvre-museum-robbery-jewels/.

[2] Alessandro Parodi, “French Police Make More Arrests in Louvre Heist Investigation,” Reuters, October 30, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/third-suspect-arrested-over-louvre-heist-french-tv-reports-2025-10-30/; Sylvie Corbet, “Two New Suspects Handed Preliminary Charges in Louvre Jewels Heist Case, Paris Prosecutor Says,” Associated Press, November 1, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/louvre-heist-crown-jewels-france-9dcac4b94c80bb95570133ee2d167f6b.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Angelique Chrisafis, “How the Louvre Museum Robbery Happened in Video, Photographs and Maps,” The Guardian, October 20, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/20/louvre-museum-robbery-thieves-stolen-jewellery.

[5] Gaspard Dhellemmes, “‘Jewelry Is Easy to Steal and Circulate’: When Gems Vanish Without a Trace,” Le Monde (English ed.), November 15, 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/m-le-mag/article/2025/11/15/jewelry-is-easy-to-steal-and-circulate-when-gems-vanish-without-a-trace_6747478_117.html.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Gabriel Stargardter and Juliette Jabkhiro, “Chasing the Louvre Loot: Inside Antwerp’s Jewellery Underworld,” Reuters, November 12, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/chasing-louvre-loot-inside-antwerps-jewellery-underworld-2025-11-12/. It should be noted that many of the factual predicates I outline in this and the prior paragraph — regarding the current location of the jewels, the jurisdictions through which they may have passed, and the condition they are now in — remain necessarily speculative; experts can only infer these details from patterns in prior cases and the limited information presently available. For the purposes of this article’s legal analysis, however, I treat these assumptions as if they were established facts in order to explore the doctrinal implications of such a scenario.

[8] Camille Labadie, “Decolonizing Collections: A Legal Perspective on the Restitution of Cultural Artifacts,” ICOFOM Study Series 49, no. 2 (2021): 132–46, http://journals.openedition.org/iss/3784; Tamás Szabados, “In Search of the Holy Grail of the Conflict of Laws of Cultural Property: Recent Trends in European Private International Law Codifications,” International Journal of Cultural Property 27, no. 3 (2020): 323–47, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739120000223.

[9] Labadie, “Decolonizing Collections,” 132–146.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Szabados, “In Search of the Holy Grail,” 419–44.

[12] “Property Law (International),” in Max Planck Encyclopedia of European Private Law, ed. Jürgen Basedow, Klaus J. Hopt, Reinhard Zimmermann, and Andreas Stier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[13] Groupe européen de droit international privé (GEDIP), “Special Rules for Cultural Objects: Explanatory Memorandum, working paper,” July 12, 2022, https://gedip-egpil.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Special-rules-for-cultural-objects_explanatory-memorandum-12072022.pdf.

[14] Tamás Szabados, “In Search of the Holy Grail of the Conflict of Laws of Cultural Property: Recent Trends in European Private International Law Codifications,” International Journal of Cultural Property 27, no. 3 (2020): 323–47, accessed November 18, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739120000223.

[15] Guillaume Weiszberg, “Article 3 du Code civil français et droit international privé,” La Grande Bibliothèque du Droit (La GBD), accessed November 18, 2025, https://www.lagbd.org/Article_3_du_Code_civil_fran%C3%A7ais_et_droit_international_priv%C3%A9_%28fr%29.

[16] Labadie, “Decolonizing Collections”; Evelien Campfens, Cross-Border Claims to Cultural Objects: Property or Heritage? (The Hague: Eleven International Publishing, 2021).

[17] Ibid.

[18] Szabados, “In Search of the Holy Grail,” 323–47.

[19] Code du patrimoine (France), art. L.451-5.

[20] Code du patrimoine (France), art. L.111-1.

[21] Cass. (ch. civ.), 10 août 1841, Cousin c. de Maillé et de la Liste civile (Fr.).

[22] Tribunal de grande instance (TGI) Paris, 6 janvier 2015, affaire du bureau “Louis XVI” (Fr.).

[23] Tribunal de grande instance (TGI) Limoges, affaire du vase “Boizot,” Cité de la céramique–Sèvres et Limoges (Fr.).

[24] Code général de la propriété des personnes publiques (CGPPP), arts. L.2112-1 and L.3111-1.

[25] Szabados, “In Search of the Holy Grail,” 323–47.

[26] Derek Fincham, “How Adopting the Lex Originis Rule” Can Impede the Flow of Illicit Cultural Property,” Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce 37, no. 1 (2008): 1–48, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1287365.

[27] Greenberg Traurig, “Restitution, Repatriation and Return: When Objects Go Back,” Lexology, February 25, 2015, https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7f50ae26-ecc8-4849-b120-55c7be70f053 (discussing Winkworth v. Christie, Manson & Woods Ltd., [1980] 1 Ch 496, and the application of Italian law as lex situs).

[28] Stato francese v. Ministero per i beni culturali ed ambientali e De Contessini, Tribunale di Roma, 27 June 1987, 71 Rivista di diritto internazionale 920 (1988), aff’d Corte di Cassazione (Italy), No. 12166, 24 November 1995, reported in Foro italiano 1996, I, 907; discussed in John Henry Merryman, “The Good Faith Acquisition of Stolen Art,” Stanford Law School Research Paper No. 1025515 (2007).

[29] Campfens, Cross-Border Claims to Cultural Objects, esp. chs. 1–2. It is also entirely possible that the jewels are, or will end up, in a country whose laws would align with France’s position and support their return. Given the heist’s visibility and the extensive law-enforcement attention it has attracted, however, it is reasonable to assume that the thieves will at least attempt to move the jewels through jurisdictions whose laws or enforcement practices they perceive as more favorable to good-faith purchasers or more fragmented in practice. More broadly, much of my analysis is necessarily hypothetical: the jewels have not yet been recovered, may never be recovered, and so the legal scenarios I develop in this paper are unavoidably speculative.

[30] Fincham, “How Adopting the Lex Originis Rule.”

[31] David L. Hall, “Stolen Cultural Property: A Due Diligence Primer,” Delaware Lawyer 25, no. 3 (2017): 8–13.