Posted by ...: Scholarly legal blogs as part of academic discourse and site for stance and engagement

This paper looks at scholarly legal blog posts as part of the new cultural practices of online scholarly legal communication and scholarly publication. Informed by a theoretical framework for genre analysis, digital genre analysis, and academic writing in a corpus of representative texts, the paper outlines first the construction and use of the blog posts as media, genre and texts where the exposition and analysis of legal issues from a core research perspective provides the platform for a major new type of academic discourse in digital communication. Looking at blog postsas the outcome of social interactions in this kind of discourse, the paper then analyses and discusses the genre as a favourable rhetorical space where a collection of interactional stance and engagement patterns help blog authors express their position and acknowledge their readers in the presentation and discussion of research-focused issues within the scholarly discipline.