Generic structure and rhetorical moves in English-language empirical law research articles: Sites of interdisciplinary and interdiscursive cross-over

• Structure of empirical law RAs largely escaped attention of discourse/genre scholars.
• Macro-structure of empirical law RAs compared to prototypical IMRD model.
• Empirical law RAs analysed for move organizational patterns across sections.
• Interdisciplinarity/interdiscursivity in theoretical/empirical law RAs.

In the globalized, competitive contemporary world of science, legal research articles (RAs) provide a favourable medium for disciplinary knowledge exchange to the wider scholarly community. However, there is little understanding of how structure reflects this knowledge in the writing of such articles.In this paper, I interrogate the overall generic structure of empirical law research articles written in English together with the set of communicative/functional move categories represented across sections of the article's structure. Using Genre Analysis as a framework and the prototypical IMRD model for the identification of discourse structure across a representative sample of texts from the genre, the study reveals structural-level features of IMRD standardization and variability within the overall rhetorical purpose of the genre, where distinct rhetorical move types contribute to determining the internal organization of discourse by providing the generic research writing with its own identity. The discourse structure and content of the public genre provides an opportunity to distinguish between theoretical and empirical tasks of writing in the legal RA genre, and to bring out the nature and function of interdisciplinarity and interdiscursivity in empirical legal research reporting. The paper concludes with some pedagogic implications for ESP teaching and research.