Managing discussions in law blogs: from post to comments

The paper explores “the dialogic action game”, which takes place in law blogs through sequences of posts by law professor blogger and comments by readers, who may be either academics or an interested, non-academic public. The corpus used for this study is taken from a legal blog website: the United Kingdom Constitutional Law Association (UKCLA). The aim is to look at how law professor bloggers interact with readers in their blogs and at how participants manage the debate. By combining corpus methodology with a discourse analytic approach, the overall findings show that the law blog post encourages participants to contribute with different kinds of comments, ranging from agreement to disagreement either with the post or with other comments. The analysis has also highlighted distinctive linguistic features of posts and comments. By addressing the interests of different types of audiences who participate in discussions, law blogs testify the important role they play in the practice of law, as they build a kind of bridge between legal academics and legal practitioners.