The Dis-Engaged Scholarship Cycle?

Am I mistaken in thinking, as I wade through the flood of abstracts for new articles making their way onto SSRN, that this publication cycle faces a stark problem of sudden, unintended irrelevance and forced dis-"engagement" in this year's crop of legal scholarship, at least in public law?

It seems to me that a great many public law articles coming down the pike right now a) deal with issues that were contemporary a short time ago but have been utterly superseded by events; b) assume a host of premises--about methodology, the functioning of courts or executives, about the basic norms of law and the functioning of government, even about fundamental values and even fundamental facts--that are now inoperative or in doubt and newly in need of justification; or c) deal with ideas and proposals that the authors treat not as abstractions but as feasible, practical, going concerns, but which have in fact been rendered as mythical and fanciful as hippogriffs.

I'm not referring to articles that the authors are fully aware are abstract, theoretical, fanciful, imaginative, impractical, or otherwise deliberately disconnected from current events or some reasonably immediate practical goal. Nor am I criticizing that kind of scholarship, at least if it is clear about what it is. (It does seem to me, though, that even these forms of scholarship will often suffer from the problem noted in (b) above. However abstract, they will still often implicitly or explicitly rely on premises that are now in doubt.) But plenty of legal scholarship is not so abstract. It is more immediate and practical in its purpose, aims to respond to current events, advances a goal-oriented political position, or seeks to have some effect in the world on a reasonably short timeline. That's always been true for legal academic writing, for reasons that hardly depend on contemporary politics or scholarship. Rather, it's simply in the nature of the American legal academy, which is still substantially a professional adjunct rather than a university enterprise, and which, despite its trappings, is still structured on a more or less non-scholarly and non-intellectual basis. That orientation is no less present in an era in which current buzzwords like "engaged scholarship" or older ones like "praxis" pop up with regularity. (Although, in fairness, articles that brandish phrases like those are often less practically oriented, and in some ways less "engaged," than, say, the average student comment.) 

It's this scholarship--or so I keep thinking as I peruse the current crop of draft articles--that has been wrenched into substantial irrelevance and "dis-engagement" by events. They read as if the author had bet on a different horse to win. Or they rely on formerly applicable understandings and definitions of political and ideological terms which have been thrown into flux. (Although that flux has been evident for some time.) Or, most understandably, they did neither of these things, but simply failed to account for the degree of disequilibrium we now face. This is not, to be clear, a knock on their quality. Rather, it's a matter of the sudden gulf between their claims to or hope of relevance and engagement, and the reality into which they now emerge. There is already often a gap, borne of the authors' location within the bubble. This is something much more than that. 

Of course this kind of thing happens any time there are significant changes in facts or law, with the ideas that might explain or account for them necessarily needing time to be worked out. We saw some of this with the first Trump term. It took a while before the law reviews started filling with discussions, often excellent, of constitutional and political "norms," illiberalism, and so on. But the disjunction was far less extreme, because that administration featured a larger number of political appointees and career employees who, quaintly, were competent, experienced, conservative, and would reject as contemptible any pledge of personal loyalty to an individual rather than to an office and to the laws and Constitution of the United States. The current personalist regime is being run on a different basis.  

Clearly it won't be long before the machine starts turning out scholarly responses to the current moment. In the meantime, it seems to me that we are about to see a volume of public law articles--including, I'm sure, a fair number of articles operating from conservative premises--whose claims of relevance or engagement were blown out of the water even before they were submitted, and must now be read as abstractions, markers for the future, or memorials.