Frank Fagan (South Texas College of Law) has posted a new, short draft paper to SSRN titled “The Coming Law Review Shortage.” The abstract:

Today, law reviews sit near equilibrium: roughly 5,000 annual submissions for about 5,600 slots. Tomorrow, large language models are likely to drive output toward 8,000. The result is a systemic shortage of publication placements. Peer review will not emerge; instead, journals will lean more heavily on prestige heuristics, expand symposia, experiment with limited faculty input, and adopt technological triage. The core student-edited model will endure, but scarcity could revalue publication across the hierarchy, thereby raising the floor of prestige, elevating specialties, and turning abundance into a more competitive, plural, and consequential marketplace for legal scholarship. Hiring committees, promotion reviews, and tenure evaluations may adapt by revaluing placements outside the traditional elite.

I have so many questions. Among them: does “more legal scholarship is coming” (presumably mostly from US law professors and would-be US law professors) mean that US law schools should create more law journals? If so, how many of those new journals should be student-edited? Should other organizations or institutions create new law journals?

Who will read any of this material? Or is it destined simply to feed future LLMs (Large Language Models)?