Amy Kellam
Member, Centre for Law in Asia, SOAS, University of London
Co-Editor, Amicus Curiae—Journal of the Society of Advanced Legal Studies
I work on international law and the cultural commons. My research develops a jurisprudence of cultural works — asking how law might recognise a work as relational, collective, and event-based rather than as an ownable asset, and what is lost when the opposite premise prevails.
What I am working on now
Current work turns on two questions. The first is jurisdictional: how the legal status of a work is constituted differently across legal orders, and what that difference reveals about the ontology law assumes. The second is temporal: how copyright law binds a work to a commodifiable time—stabilising the gap between creation and market life—and what creative time looks like when it is released from that frame.
Projects
Eo1 is a collective venture founded by Gavin Keeney, developing what he describes as a form-of-life for artistic-literary scholarship. Its roots are in transmedia practice: iterative, generative work developed across stages, each provisional and open to being superseded. The venture's ethos is that scholarship and art dedicated to the commons should circulate freely, without the claims of exclusive rights. It is a humanities project first, and a technical one only where the technical makes the humanities possible.
My contribution has been to articulate the distinction between recording and governing, and to develop the legal thinking that follows from it — a jurisprudence of cultural works grounded in an ontology of the work as relational. On that basis, I built a non-discretionary register of works and their relations, with an attestation layer on the Celo network, and a cluster model in which groups self-govern. Its demonstration cluster, Commoning, tests the precepts against law, technology, and practice.
Alongside this, I have built the notary — a tool for recording that a document existed at a moment in time, without publishing it. It uses the same attestation infrastructure as the register, but applies it to a private claim rather than a shared one. The heartbeat agent, which attests the integrity of this site daily, is a third instance of the same pattern.
Working Papers
I also maintain working papers: short notes on IPFS, attestation schemas, blockchain context, and the design choices that shape what a register can and cannot hold. They are written as the research proceeds, and revised as the argument develops.
Other Writing
Peer-reviewed articles and chapters on public international law, the history of international law in Europe and China, and the cultural commons. I am also the author of a novel, Mirrorhouse, long-listed for the 2026 McKitterick Award, and co-editor of Amicus Curiae.