This essay charts the co-implication of the personal and the intellectual in the work of international legal thinker Krystyna Marek, a Polish exile who wrote in the context of the dissolution of empire in Eastern Europe. Marek’s 1954 book The Identity and Continuity of States in Public International Law reflected a fundamental shift in international legal reasoning on the birth and death of states. How and through what means might a state’s legal identity survive revolution, imperial administration, or belligerent occupation? How would observers know if a state’s international personality was extinguished? To offer a legal answer to these questions, Marek argued, one must think ‘from outside states,’ as states themselves were unable to think their own non-existence. She contributed the first systematic presentation of international law as a vantage point (or legal fiction) that existed both before and after states, and was thus capable of governing their creation and extinction.