Kim Lane Scheppele

Kim Lane Scheppele is an American scholar of law and politics. She is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Professor Kim Lane Scheppele
Scheppele in October 2016
Title	Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Academic background
Education	Barnard College (BA) University of Chicago (PhD)
Academic work
Institutions	Princeton School of Public and International Affairs University of Pennsylvania Law School

Scheppele is an expert on authoritarian regimes, as well as Hungarian and Poland's politics and law.

Early life and education

She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago (1985) and her A.B. in urban studies from Barnard College (1975).

Career

Scheppele was at the University of Michigan from 1984 to 1996, and was an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor from 1993 until her departure for Penn.

Scheppele worked in Hungary in the 1990s, during which she met Viktor Orbán. During the socialist-liberal coalition government of Gyula Horn, she was a researcher at the Constitutional Court and served as an expert advisor to the constitutional drafting committee of the Hungarian Parliament in 1995-1996. She was the founding Co-Director of the MA Program in Gender and Culture at Central European University, when the program was first accredited.

Scheppele joined the Princeton faculty in 2005, after nearly a decade as the John J. O'Brien Professor of Comparative Law and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she is still a faculty fellow.

Criticism of democratic backsliding

Criticism of Viktor Orbán

Now a leading critic of the right-wing Viktor Orbán government, she has called its actions as creating an "unconstitutional constitution", and that Hungarian democracy is in jeopardy. She called Tünde Handó a "judicial Czar" whose role damaged the independence of the Hungarian judiciary. Scheppele also called a proposed constitutional rewrite in 2013 "a toxic waste dump of bad constitutional ideas", which prompted Fidesz MEP György Schöpflin to attack her claims on the basis of political animosity. In the name of the governing Fidesz party, Gergely Gulyás published an open letter to her, claiming that the reasons for her aversion towards the legislation of the Fidesz "are mostly personal and political." She worked together with Hungarian opposition parties to bring down the Orbán government.

In 2013, she testified before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, repeating her thesis, that Hungary is slanting towards an authoritarian and oligarchic regime.

In December 2017, in an interview in the Hungarian weekly, HVG, Scheppele stated that an opposition cooperation is needed to bring down the Orbán regime in the 2018 Hungarian elections, but the leftist opposition parties are divided, and it is possible that the Fidesz government blackmails some of the socialist politicians. The only party which could put an end to the Orbán regime is the Jobbik, and she expressed her disapproval of the government attacks on this party. In her understanding "the electoral system has been designed in a way that makes it impossible for the opposition parties to win unless they all unite". She described Viktor Orbán as a charismatic leader "who melts people's brain by focusing his attention on them."

Criticism of Donald Trump

Also a critic of the Trump administration, Scheppele underlined that the markers of a falling democracy — "politicizing independent institutions, spreading disinformation, amassing executive power, quashing dissent, and corrupting elections—form a sort of authoritarian playbook, mirroring what scholars have observed in declining democracies around the world, in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela" (page 29) could also be found in the actions of president Donald Trump, and tried to "illuminate similarities in the hopes that we can recognize them early enough to prevent the United States from drifting any further down these roads"(page 37).

Selected bibliography

• Arianna Vedaschi and Kim Lane Scheppele (eds.), 9/11 and the Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law: How the UN Security Council Rules the World (Cambridge University Press, July 2021).
• Kim Lane Scheppele, Dimitry Kochenov and Barbara Grabowska-Moroz, EU Values are Law, After All: Enforcing EU Values through Systemic Infringement Actions by the European Commission and the Member States of the European Union, 29 Yearbook of European Law 3-121 (2021)
• David Pozen and Kim Lane Scheppele, “Executive Underreach, in Pandemics and Otherwise,” With David Pozen. American Journal of International Law, November 2020, preprint available here
• Kriszta Kovács and Kim Lane Scheppele, “The Fragility of an Independent Judiciary: Lessons from Hungary and Poland – and the European Union.” 51 Journal of Communist and Post-Communist Studies 189-200 (2018), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “The Party’s Over.” pp. 495–515 in Mark Graber, Sanford Levinson and Mark Tushnet (eds.), Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? Oxford University Press, 2018, available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Autocratic Legalism.” 85 University of Chicago Law Review 545-583 (2018), available here
• Laurent Pech and Kim Lane Scheppele, “Illiberalism Within: Rule of Law Backsliding in the European Union.” Cambridge Yearbook of European Law (2017), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Enforcing the Basic Principles of EU Law through Systemic Infringement Procedures.” In Dimitry Kochenov and Carlos Closa (eds.), Reinforcing the Rule of Law Oversight in the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “The Empire of Security and the Security of Empire.” 27 Temple Journal of Comparative and International Law 241-278 (2014), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “The Rule of Law and the Frankenstate: Why Governance Checklists Do Not Work.” 26 Governance 559-562 (2013), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “The Empire’s New Laws: Terrorism and the New Security Empire after 9/11.” pp. 245–278 in George Steinmetz (ed.), Sociology and Empire. (Duke University Press, 2013).
• Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai and Kim Lane Scheppele, “Hungary’s Illiberal Turn: Dismantling the Constitution.” With 21(3) Journal of Democracy 138-145 (2012), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “The New Judicial Deference.” 92 Boston University Law Review 89-170 (2012), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “The International Standardization of National Security Law.” 4 Journal of National Security Law and Policy 437-453 (2010), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Exceptions that Prove the Rule: Embedding Emergency Government in Everyday Constitutional Life.” pp. 124–154 in Stephen Macedo and Jeff Tulis (eds.), The Limits of Constitutional Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2010), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Guardians of the Constitution: Constitutional Court Presidents and the Struggle for the Rule of Law in Post-Soviet Europe.” 154 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1757-1851 (2006), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Small Emergencies.” 40 Georgia Law Review 835-862 (2006).
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Hypothetical Torture in the War on Terrorism.” 1 Journal of National Security Law and Policy 285-340 (2005), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “’We Forgot About the Ditches:’ Russian Constitutional Impatience and the Challenge of Terrorism.” 53 Drake Law Review 963-1027 (2005), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Constitutional Ethnography: An Introduction.” 38(3) Law and Society Review 389-406 (2004), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “A Realpolitik Defense of Social Rights.” 82(7) University of Texas Law Review 1921-1961 (2004), available here.
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Law in a Time of Emergency: States of Exception and the Temptations of 9/11.” 6(5) University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 1001-1083 (2004), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Aspirational and Aversive Constitutionalism: The Case for Studying Cross-Constitutional Influence through Negative Models.”  1(2) I-CON (International Journal of Constitutional Law) 296-324 (2003), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “When the Law Doesn’t Count: The Rule of Law and Election 2000.” 149 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1361-1437 (2001), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “The Inevitable Corruption of Transition.” 14 University of Connecticut Journal of International Law 509-532 (1999), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, "Manners of Imagining the Real." 19 Law and Social Inquiry 995-1022 (1994), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, “Law without Accidents.” In Social Theory for a Changing Society. Edited by Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman (Westview Press, 1991), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, "Facing Facts in Legal Interpretation." 30 Representations 42-77 (1990), available here
• Kim Lane Scheppele, Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.)