Autocratic Legalism Kim Lane Scheppele Upd

Laws are passed through proper parliamentary procedures. Courts issue written opinions. Appeals are available. Yet the substantive effect is to entrench ruling-party power beyond electoral reach.

While she moved to Princeton’s Department of Sociology in 2005 (with affiliations to the Woodrow Wilson School and the Program in Law and Public Policy), her voice remains prominent in Penn circles. She has been a frequent speaker at the at Penn, and many of her key post-2010 articles were developed during sabbaticals and workshops in Philadelphia. The association is so strong that even the University of Chicago Law Review symposium on autocratic legalism included UPenn scholars as commentators, reinforcing the mental link.

Example B — Poland (Law and Justice party, PiS, since 2015)

A free press is essential to democratic accountability, which is precisely why autocratic legalists move quickly to bring media under state control. Scheppele has documented how Orbán's government took direct control of public media, pressured private media owners to align with government narratives, and used advertising budgets to reward loyal outlets while starving critical ones. The result is an information ecosystem in which government corruption and abuse go unreported and opposition voices are systematically silenced. autocratic legalism kim lane scheppele upd

is a highly calculated governing technique where democratically elected leaders utilize constitutional engineering, legislative adjustments, and institutional reinterpretation to dismantle liberal democratic systems from within. Coined and popularized by Princeton University sociologist and legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele in her seminal 2018 essay published in the University of Chicago Law Review , the concept reveals how modern authoritarianism bypasses violent, military coups. Instead, it relies on a "playbook" executed entirely within the formal bounds of the law, making democratic backsliding difficult to detect, measure, or penalize.

One of Scheppele’s most enduring contributions to the literature is her metaphor of the "Frankenstate." Drawing on the image of Frankenstein’s monster, she describes how autocrats stitch together their regimes using bits and pieces of established democratic systems. They do not invent new, alien forms of government; rather, they find the worst, most repressive elements of various constitutions and combine them into a monster that can overpower the democratic host.

Rather than a Schmittian sovereign dictating outside law, autocratic legalism declares emergencies (migration, pandemic, terrorism) and then converts emergency powers into ordinary, permanent law. Laws are passed through proper parliamentary procedures

Implementing regulations or tax laws that target critical media outlets or consolidate state-aligned media.

In the end, autocratic legalism teaches a lesson that democracies forget at their peril:

Scheppele argues that because these leaders follow a "script," their actions are often predictable. Yet the substantive effect is to entrench ruling-party

Packing supreme and constitutional courts via expanding the bench.

Scheppele's own work has moved beyond diagnosis to prescription. In her 2025 Kelly Lecture, she argued that we need "a new approach to thinking about the rule of law in order to escape from the autocratic trap, one that sets the restoration of democracy rather than the blind adherence to legality as the normative standard". This is not a retreat from law, but a reorientation: law must be understood not as a neutral procedural framework but as a normative project that serves democratic values. When legality becomes detached from democracy, it ceases to be the rule of law and becomes merely rule by law—and rule by law, as Scheppele has shown, is the preferred instrument of the new autocrats.