In a 2021 interview with the Journal of Democracy , Scheppele was asked whether she was optimistic. Her answer was characteristically lawyerly: “Optimism is not a category of analysis. But clarity is. If we call autocratic legalism by its name—if we stop saying ‘democratic backsliding’ and start saying ‘legalized autocracy’—then we have a chance to build the defenses. Without the diagnosis, there is no prescription.” Kim Lane Scheppele’s journey from Penn to Princeton, from anthropology to law, from post-Soviet constitutional courts to the Hungarian parliament, has produced one of the most urgent bodies of political-legal thought in the 21st century. Autocratic legalism is her gift to the opposition—a concept sharp enough to cut through the fog of legal bureaucracy and reveal the strongman in the judge’s robe.
Scheppele’s diagnosis forced a painful realization: The EU’s famous “Copenhagen criteria” (requiring new members to have stable institutions guaranteeing democracy and rule of law) had no enforcement mechanism once a member backslid legally. The union had weapons against naked coups, but none against constitutions rewritten by majority vote. If Hungary was the first mover, Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) perfected the model after 2015. Scheppele, writing with her frequent collaborator Wojciech Sadurski, tracked how PiS replicated and even accelerated Orbán’s playbook: packing the Constitutional Tribunal, subordinating the ordinary judiciary through a new disciplinary chamber, and weaponizing lustration laws against judges who resisted. autocratic legalism kim lane scheppele upd
But autocratic legalism is not a Central European pathology. In a widely circulated 2020 essay, The End of the Trump Era and the Future of Autocratic Legalism , Scheppele turned her lens to the United States. She argued that while Donald Trump was a clumsy autocrat—more impulse than strategy—his administration had nevertheless deployed autocratic legalist tactics: a travel ban justified by statutory authority, the separation of migrant families under a literal reading of a 1997 consent decree, the rewriting of postal service rules before an election, and the relentless pressure on the Department of Justice to act as a personal law firm. In a 2021 interview with the Journal of