‘In this post, I argue that…’: constructing argumentative discourse in scholarly law blog posts

This study is based on the analysis of scholarly law blog posts written by British and American law professors commenting on legal cases relating to US and UK court decisions. The aim is to investigate how law professor bloggers construct their argumentative discourse while communicating with their scholarly legal community. The analysis reveals interesting argumentative strategies and language features which shed light on the argumentative dimension of the genre under examination. More specifically, it emerges that reporting a judge’s or a court’s decision on legal cases is a point of departure for the blogger’s development of his/her argumentative discourse. The overall findings show that bloggers are responding to individual purpose when they engage in the discourse of scholarly legal blogging: while offering personal opinion on legal cases, they try to introduce context of knowledge discussion within the discipline.