Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and Director of the Program in Law and Normative Thinking at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.  Scheppele’s work focuses on the rise and fall of constitutional democracy.  After 1989, Scheppele studied the new constitutional courts of Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, she researched the effects of the international “war on terror” on constitutional protections around the world.   Since 2010, she has been documenting attacks on constitutional democracy by legalistic autocrats.  Her book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

Scheppele is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Comparative Law.  In 2014, she received the Law and Society Association’s Kalven Prize for influential scholarship in comparative constitutional law and in 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on democratic backsliding.   She started her career in the political science department at the University of Michigan before moving to a full-time professorship in the law school at the University of Pennsylvania.  She was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest and has held visiting faculty positions in the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, and Humboldt/Berlin.    She was President of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019.