Kim Lane Scheppele
Kim Lane Scheppele 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. Scheppele works on topics related to comparative constitutional ethnography within the sociology of law.
She spent several years living in Hungary and Russia doing fieldwork on the creation of new constitutions after the revolutions of 1989. In the post-9/11 era, she became interested in the global impact of anti-terrorism laws on constitutional democracies. Her research on autocracy and democratic backsliding in the 21st century led her to expand upon the concept of autocratic legalism by Javier Corrales. She coined the term "Frankenstate" to describe the kind of governance that emerges from autocratic legalism.
Her book Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law received multiple awards. For her research advancing law and society, she was awarded the Kalven Prize in 2014. She was elected to the American [Academy of Arts and Sciences] in 2016. She is currently recognized as an expert on authoritarian regimes.
Early life and education
Scheppele earned her A.B. in urban studies from Barnard College in 1975. As an undergraduate she was influenced by her teachers and advisers Robert K. Merton, Herbert J. Gans and Guillermina Jasso. After receiving her A.B., she worked as a newspaper journalist before pursuing graduate studies at the University of Chicago. She found inspiration in the work of legal scholar Karl Llewellyn, in the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, and in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alfred Schütz. She cites her courses by Brian Simpson as the key influence and development of her legal philosophy and approach. She received an M.A. in 1977 and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1985. Arthur Stinchcombe, Edward Shils, James Coleman, and Richard Posner were on her dissertation committee.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. After the Hungarian Parliament passed a resolution to establish the Constitutional Court of Hungary in 1989, Scheppele received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study it. She moved to Hungary in 1994, where she spent the next four years working at the Constitutional Court and teaching at Central European University. She also learned the Hungarian language.In addition to working as a researcher at the Constitutional Court during the socialist-liberal coalition government of Gyula Horn, she served as an expert advisor to the constitutional drafting committee of the Hungarian Parliament from 1995-1996. Scheppele was the founding Co-Director of the MA Program in Gender and Culture at Central European University, when the program was first accredited and CEU was still located in Budapest. 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.
Research
Scheppele's research focuses on the dynamics of constitutional governance, a research topic that arose after the revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of communist governments in Eastern Europe. She lived in Hungary and Russia during this time, giving her insight into the subject as new constitutions emerged out of the chaos. She continued her research on constitutional government after the September 11 attacks, analyzing the impact of new laws on constitutional integrity created during the global war on terror.In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, she began to look at autocratic legalism and how it leads to democratic backsliding when leaders are elected by popular vote and then work to dismantle the very system which got them elected. Scheppele coined the term "Frankenstate" to describe this new kind of legal, but illiberal governance created by autocrats from the pieces of disparate, democratic constitutional provisions. The metaphor of the Frankenstate draws inspiration from the image of Frankenstein's monster, a simulacrum of a person created from different body parts which when put together produced a so-called monster. To illustrate the Frankenstate, Scheppele points to the rise of illiberal autocracies in the European Union, particularly the deteriorating state of human rights and weakening of the rule of law in Hungary under the government of Viktor Orbán.
Scheppele argues that Orbán borrowed separate pieces from democratic governments—gerrymandering in the United States, first-past-the-post voting in Britain, and the winner compensation rule in Italy—all of which, when combined with election rules unique to Hungary, produce the Frankenstate. These separate pieces give the deceptive appearance of democratic norms and functions to election monitors, but when put together as a whole, often work against democracy in practice and promote autocracy. Scheppele notes that the Frankenstate tactic is not unique to Hungary, and can be found in Turkey and even the United States.
In her research, Scheppele discusses how to stop creeping autocracy. Scheppele testified in 2013 before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, warning that Hungary was moving towards authoritarianism and oligarchy. She has also written about the threat Trumpism poses to American democracy.
After Trump denied being a dictator, but also added "A lot of people are saying, 'Maybe we like a dictator'", Scheppele commented on the changing status of governance in the United States. She initially declined to describe Trump as a dictator or his administration as a dictatorship until September 2025. "If I was hesitating before", she told The Guardian, "it's this mobilization of the national guard and the indication that he plans to overtake resistance by force that now means we're in it...He's really planning a military, repressive force, to go out into the streets of the places that are most likely to resist his dictatorship and to just put down the whole thing by force." Other experts like political scientist Steven Levitsky initially were skeptical, but by late 2025, Levitsky had softened his stance, arguing along with Daniel Ziblatt that the United States had become a competitive authoritarian regime, with Trump now using language similar to that of a military dictator.