Kim Lane Scheppele’s scholarship examines the rise and fall of constitutional government.
She moved to Eastern Europe after the Autumn of Nations in 1989 to study how new constitutions were being enacted and entrenched. Post-9/11, she examined how constitutions fared under the stress of anti-terrorism campaigns with their repressive new laws — both in the United States and elsewhere. Currently, she’s concentrating in particular on changes within the European Union, exploring the way that the EU has had difficulty holding its own against national popular movements that brought about Brexit and the rise of illiberal autocracies among the member states.
Broadly, Scheppele has studied the way that democracies have come under stress, focusing on the rise of new autocrats, particularly those who are elected on populist political platforms and who then use the law to undermine constitutional institutions.
And in the first few months of 2025, she was very, very busy.
“Are we sleepwalking into an autocracy? We hope not, and we would be glad if the threat does not materialize,” Scheppele wrote in a Jan. 15, 2025, New York Times guest essay she authored with Norm Eisen. “But as close observers of people and places where democracy has come under pressure and occasionally buckled, we see creeping autocracy as a distinct and underdiscussed possibility.”
Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, will speak at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, delivering the 21st Annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States.
One month after her New York Times guest essay, Scheppele spoke with Amna Nawaz for PBS News Hour; Nawaz asked her what was different between President Donald Trump’s first term, and his second.
“Second time, he comes back and he’s got lawyers. Everything is legal,” Scheppele said. “That’s why you see the flurry of executive orders. You see these memos going out saying the president has commanded this in law. And so he’s going after the civil service, for example. And civil servants who work from one government to another, from Republican to a Democratic administration, and back again, are used to having somebody say, this is now the law, you follow it.”
If the American constitutional system were working, Scheppele wrote in February for the global constitutional law blog Verfassungsblog, most of the flurry of Trump’s executive orders wouldn’t be effective because of higher-level laws — like the Constitution.
“But the American constitutional order is changing,” she wrote. “… The courts of first instance are not amused. In the first few weeks of Trump’s second term, at least 75 cases were filed challenging not only the creation and elimination of government departments, but also the upending of civil service law and procedures, the impoundment of funds, the cruel changes to immigration rules, the creation with no legal authority of new forms of administrative leaves and buyouts, the apparent permissions given to Elon Musk and his minions to ransack through the most sensitive government databases — and more.”
In most of these cases, courts across the country issued temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions.
“It is not clear,” she wrote in Verfassungsblog, “whether the Trump administration is obeying these court orders.”
Scheppele, who is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and serves as a global jurist on the executive committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law.
Her book, Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law, won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association as well as the Corwin Prize of the American Political Science Association, and in 2014 Scheppele received the Kalven Prize from the Law and Society Association.
In a May panel at the New School, Scheppele was one of several experts discussing “The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective” — or, as its moderator summarized, “on bureaucracy and its discontents.”
Scheppele spoke first, drawing on her scholarship as one of America’s “preeminent experts on contemporary Hungary.”
“What we’ve learned from Hungary is that defying autocrats works best if there is unity across sectors, because it’s much easier for autocrats to pick off institutions one by one than to address a united front,” she said. “And, I might add, it gets worse once an autocracy becomes entrenched. That means that the time to act is now.”
