Rate My Professor 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 the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law, and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She also works in sociological theory, comparative and historical sociology, political sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and human rights. Professor Scheppele’s research examines the rise and fall of constitutional government. After 1989, she lived in Hungary and Russia for extended periods, studying how new constitutions were enacted and entrenched. After 9/11, she examined how constitutions fared under the stress of anti-terrorism campaigns. After the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, she has focused on the rise of elected autocrats who use the law to undermine constitutional institutions, with particular attention to changes within the European Union and illiberal autocracies among member states.

Professor Scheppele taught for many years in the political science department at the University of Michigan before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She was the founding co-director of the gender studies program at Central European University in Budapest and served as director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton. She has been a visiting professor of law at Humboldt University, Berlin; Erasmus University, Rotterdam; and both Yale and Harvard Law Schools. Her work has been widely recognized. In 2014, she received the Kalven Prize from the Law and Society Association. In 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, serves as a global jurist on the executive committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law, and was elected president of the Law and Society Association for 2017-2019. Her book Legal Secrets won special recognition from the American Sociological Association and the Corwin Prize from the American Political Science Association. She has published widely in social science and law journals and is a frequent commentator on Verfassungsblog.