Five Questions with Princeton Professor Kim Scheppele

Kim 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, is a widely recognized authority on the sociology of law. She specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions, and her work focuses on the rise and fall of constitutional governments. What does all of that mean for us, and our study of law and democracy?

Kim is an expert on a topic none of us ever wanted to have to study: how to lose a democracy. That’s also the title of a paper she delivered at a recent academic conference—you can watch her present on the topic here. She has been studying in this area and actively working in the field in places like Hungary for decades and she is one of the most generous people I know when it comes to sharing her expertise and helping the rest of us understand precisely how dangerous the moment we are living in is.

Her paper starts out like this: “Those of us who have studied the weakening of democratic governments elsewhere are even more alarmed because the U.S. is following the autocratic playbook in which an aspirational autocrat, emboldened by electoral victory, takes office and fundamentally changes existing law. And within the space of only a few years, democracy is gone.”

I’m fortunate to have Kim as a colleague, and tonight, I’ve asked her to share her thoughts about where we are as a country with us. It’s not fun, light, Friday night/Saturday morning reading. But it is essential. There is a lot of information packed into this column—Kim gives us a master class in comparative democracy and what we need to know right now.

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