Autocratic Legalism Kim Lane Scheppele Upd !new!

Autocrats borrow tactics—such as court-packing, constitutional amendments, and media control—from each other.

Independent civil society organizations—human rights groups, environmental advocates, anti-corruption watchdogs—are the immune system of democracy. Autocratic legalists attack them through a combination of laws: foreign funding restrictions that label them as foreign agents, intrusive reporting requirements that overwhelm their administrative capacity, and criminal defamation laws that chill their speech. In Russia, a law targeting "foreign agents" has been used to systematically dismantle civil society; in Hungary, the government has used similar tactics to drive human rights organizations out of the country.

Experts like those at the American Constitution Society suggest that stopping autocratic legalism requires: Autocratic Legalism and the Threat to Academic Freedom

Autocratic legalism sits in the treacherous space between them. It is, Scheppele writes, the use of liberal legal forms to achieve autocratic ends . The autocrat does not burn the constitution; he reinterprets it. He does not abolish parliament; he shrinks its quorum. He does not jail all opposition journalists; he passes a defamation law with such breathtakingly vague standards that only the government’s critics are charged.

: Modifying judicial selection committees to ensure only loyalists are appointed. autocratic legalism kim lane scheppele upd

Appendix — Practical checklist for journalists, NGOs, or analysts

Example A — Hungary (post-2010, Viktor Orbán and Fidesz)

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, affiliated with the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. Her scholarly path took a decisive turn after 1989, when she moved to Eastern Europe to study the emergence of constitutional law in Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, she turned her attention to how the international "war on terror" eroded constitutional protections globally. Then, in 2010, she witnessed something she had not anticipated: the slow-motion dismantling of democracy in Hungary by a government that had won a supermajority at the polls. Since then, she has been documenting the rise of autocratic legalism, first in Hungary and Poland, then across the European Union and around the world. In 2024, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Constitutional Studies Fellow, a recognition of her growing influence.

Autocratic Legalism: Kim Lane Scheppele’s Analysis of Democracy’s Destruction by Law In Russia, a law targeting "foreign agents" has

[Democratic Election] ➔ [Capturing the Legislature] ➔ [Rewriting the Constitution] ➔ [Neutralizing the Judiciary] ➔ [Monopolizing Power Lawfully]

The process typically follows a specific "script": Win free and fair elections.

: Rather than censoring media outright, autocrats use tax laws, regulatory bodies, and state advertising allocations to squeeze independent media and fund state-backed echo chambers.

No scholar has done more to diagnose, name, and theorize this paradox than , the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University (and formerly a long-time affiliated faculty at the University of Pennsylvania ’s Law School—a frequent source of confusion given her deep ties to the Penn legal community). Her master concept— autocratic legalism —has become the indispensable keyword for understanding how modern authoritarians use the tools of law to kill the spirit of law. The autocrat does not burn the constitution; he

No theory goes unchallenged. Critics of autocratic legalism raise three objections.

The crucial difference, Scheppele noted, is institutional depth. Hungary and Poland had years to capture courts and civil service. Trump faced a more resilient federal judiciary and a norm-bound bureaucracy. But his legacy, she warned, was normalizing the idea that law is simply the will of the executive expressed in statutory language. That normalization is the antechamber to autocratic legalism.

Coined by political scientist Javier Corrales and famously expanded by Princeton University sociologist and legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele in her seminal 2018 paper published in the University of Chicago Law Review , the concept explains why modern democratic backsliding rarely involves violent military coups. Instead, today’s autocrats rely on teams of lawyers rather than tanks to build illiberal regimes under a flawless veneer of procedural legitimacy. The Core Concept: Rule BY Law vs. Rule OF Law