Intended as a study of stancetaking patterns in judicial opinions, this article aims at contributing to stance-related investigations of specialist discourse. For this purpose, it builds on the work of stance researchers and interactional linguists as well as attempts to apply their concepts in an examination of written data. In particular, the analysis is informed by Du Bois"s interactional concept of stance and the two related notions of epistemicity and evidentiality. It also follows Chilton"s discourse space theory in what is proposed as a stance analysis framework intended to aid researchers in categorising individual stance acts. The study draws on data from a theme-focused corpus of US Supreme Court opinions dealing with capital punishment.
