The Legal Blog (Blawg): generic integrity and variation

This study focuses on law blogs, often referred to as "blawgs", and is part of a wider research project on this type of blogs in the legal field. A corpus of legal blogs (Above the Law Blog, UK Human Rights Blog, The Magistrates’ Blog, Wall Street Journal Law Blog) is explored to assess the degree of variation across them, correlating results with various contextual and inherent factors. The ultimate purpose is that of verifying whether variation inside the sub-genre is so substantial as to compromise its generic integrity and its membership of the blog genre, in a context where this has been put into question. Other aspects considered is the overall discursive organization, content orientation, and inner constitution. This makes make it possible to shed light on issues concerning the conceptualization and evolution of the blog genre and its sub-genres and provides the opportunity to reflect on the role of blogs and bloggers in the construction and dissemination of [legal] knowledge. The linguistic features analysed with a view to identifying elements of commonality and differentiation in the blawgs are: recourse to self-mention, the internal constitution, the most frequent lexical items as evidence of content-orientation. In the final part, there is an analysis of some samples of texts from the blawgs with the aim of putting findings into focus.