Al Brophy (North Carolina) has a provocative post on Scholarship After the Fall:

In my continuing concern about what the academy will look like after the carnage of the crash is over, I want to turn to where legal scholarship is headed. I thought about titling this post, "The Coming Decline in Publication Requirements" — but that would have been misleading for a reason that I'll talk about shortly. …

In post-crash America, we do things slow, if we are fortunate enough to have the resources to do them at all. Perhaps we'll also return to traditional topics: doctrine in the case of legal academics, close readings of cases, maybe we'll refocus on ideas. Hard to know where this is all headed, but I think the changes will be big.

And in part I think the coming increase in teaching loads will also contribute to this. When you're teaching four sections of 80 students and serving on a couple of university committees, it won't be possible to write as much as people have been doing of late. There's something lost here, obviously. But we will gain some things as well. One gain is the pleasure of working with more students; perhaps another gain is that there will be an attempt to perfect our work. At least maybe that's way of thinking about making a virtue out of a necessity.

So maybe one of the things we'll see "after the fall" is a decline in number of publications expected, but maybe also an increased emphasis on quality. Fewer publications make it easier for tenure and hiring committees to take seriously work. Who knows — but perhaps that'll happen.

I hope Al is wrong and that law schools like ours will be able to continue the increased faculty scholarship we have achieved in recent years: