Professor 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 intersection of constitutional and transnational law, particularly in constitutional systems under stress.  After 1989, she lived and worked in Eastern Europe, studying the rise of constitutional government in the region.   After 9/11, she focused on the rise of global security law at the UN Security Council and corrosive effects of UN resolutions on domestic constitutionalism around the world.  This study resulted in the book, edited with Arianna Vedaschi, 9/11 and the Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law (Cambridge UP, 2021).   As democracies started to weaken and then collapse after the turn of the millennium, Scheppele has focused on the uses of law by aspirational autocrats, undermining checks and balances, rigging elections and weakening democratic resilience.   Her book Destroying Democracy by Law will be published by Harvard University Press in 2025.  Most recently, she has examined attempts by transnational institutions like the European Union and the Inter-American system to deal with rogue states in their midst, culminating in the 2023 Grotius Lecture of the American Society of International Law called “Restoring Democracy through International Law.” 

Professor 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 and in 2024 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on threats to constitutional democracy.   She has been a resident fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK, Vienna), the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton) and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, Vienna) and is the recipient of multiple research grants from the US National Science Foundation.   She has taught law, political science and sociology as a tenured faculty member at both University of Michigan (1984-1996) and the University of Pennsylvania (1996-2005), was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest (1996-1998) and has held visiting faculty positions in the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, and Humboldt/Berlin.  From 2005-2015, she was the director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs.  She has served as a “global jurist” on the Executive Committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law and as President of the Law and Society Association.