Call for Papers
Dr Gavin Keeney and Dr Amy Kellam invite submissions to the legal journal Amicus Curiae for a special section on the relationship between law and cultural production in the contemporary moment.
Cultural production – the making, circulating, and governing of texts, images, sounds, and knowledge – has long been shaped by legal frameworks. Law determines what can be made (through prohibitions, permissions, and incentives), who can claim it (through authorship, ownership, and attribution rules), how it can travel (through licensing, territorial rights, and exhaustion doctrines), and who gets to decide when disputes arise (through jurisdiction, choice of law, and remedies). These frameworks are sites of persistent tension.
Today, the tensions inherent in legal frameworks are exacerbated by digital networks, global platforms, and emerging techno‑determinist infrastructures. But the underlying questions are not new. They concern the very nature of authorship, ownership, the commons, and the conditions under which cultural works flourish and develop their own “voice”.
This special issue seeks to bring together scholarship from across disciplines – law, economics, anthropology, critical theory, history of arts, and beyond – provided that the work engages substantively with law – whether as doctrine, institution, theory, history, practice, or lived norm – and makes that engagement central to its argument. Contributions may engage with questions such as:
- How does law enable, constrain, or reshape cultural production?
- Where are the sites of friction, ambiguity, or opportunity?
- What alternative legal imaginaries might better serve the cultural commons?
Potential areas of inquiry include (but are not limited to):
- Historical and genealogical surveys of intellectual property
- Philosophical foundations of ownership and the commons
- The economics of cultural production (platform labour, cognitive capitalism, political economy of creative work)
- Critical theories of cultural production (ideologies of authorship, originality, and the work as a legal category; how law constitutes rather than merely regulates cultural production)
- Intellectual property and indigenous cultural heritage
- Disability rights and access in global IP regimes (e.g., Marrakesh Treaty)
- AI‑generated content and the future of authorship
- The elective abolition of IPR
The special section will follow Amicus Curiae’s standard editorial and peer‑review process. All accepted essays will be published in issue 8:2 of the journal.
As a secondary experiment, accepted essays may also be archived on a planned BLACKBOX platform (a Web3 infrastructure that we will build as part of this project). The experiment has two modest aims. First, to test a simple technical process: using a smart contract and blockchain registry to create a permanent, publicly verifiable link between each author and their work. Second, to stimulate reflection on whether Web3 technologies (decentralised storage, cryptographic signatures, transparent ledgers) might offer infrastructure for a truly open and free cultural commons. The overriding ethos of the BLACKBOX experiment is the commons as common good.
This secondary archiving does not affect the journal publication, which remains under the standard CC‑BY licence.
Amicus Curiae is the official journal of both the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. It is an open access journal, indexed in HeinOnline, Google Scholar and the SAS-Space Repository (journal website).
Submission requirements and timeline
Proposals should take the form of a 300‑word abstract accompanied by the author’s institutional affiliation and a short biographical note. Independent scholars are welcome to participate.
Please send proposals to both guest editors ([email protected] and [email protected]) by 15 July 2026. We aim to notify accepted authors by 15 August 2026.
Final papers should be 8,000–10,000 words (including footnotes) and are due by 1 December 2026.
Enquiries and proposals are welcome from early career researchers as well as established scholars.