In her landmark 2018 article, Autocratic Legalism (University of Chicago Law Review), Scheppele draws a sharp line between two familiar forms of governance. The first is authoritarian legality—the brute-force law of dictatorships, where courts are rubber stamps and legal forms are mere window dressing for raw power. The second is liberal legality—the ideal of the rule of law, where general, public, prospective, and consistent norms bind both citizen and sovereign.
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.
Four characteristics define the strategy:
Scheppele is careful to distinguish this from mere “rule by law” (where law is a tool of power). Autocratic legalism is more insidious because it preserves the discourse of constitutionalism. It celebrates legality while hollowing it out. As she put it in a 2019 lecture at UPenn: “They are not burning the law books. They are rewriting them, one chapter per election, and insisting we still call the book a constitution.” autocratic legalism kim lane scheppele upd
Scheppele developed this concept primarily to analyze the post-2010 trajectories of:
She has also noted parallels in other contexts, such as Turkey (Erdoğan) , Venezuela (Maduro) , and increasingly Israel (judicial overhaul proposals) and India (use of constitutional amendments and regulatory power).
Scheppele argues that autocratic legalism operates on three distinct but interconnected levels. Understanding these helps identify the "playbook" of modern authoritarians. Scheppele is careful to distinguish this from mere
For readers encountering the search term “autocratic legalism kim lane scheppele upd” (likely a typographical shorthand for “UPenn” or “UPenn Law”), it is worth untangling the institutional threads.
Kim Lane Scheppele earned her J.D. and Ph.D. (in anthropology) from the University of Chicago. She taught at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for a transformative period from 1998 to 2005, where she was the Stephen A. Schiller Professor of Law and a key figure in the interdisciplinary Law & Society movement. During those years, she wrote foundational work on constitutional identity, emergency powers, and Central European transitions—work that directly foreshadowed autocratic legalism.
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 Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy 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. Scheppele developed this concept primarily to analyze the
Thus, searching “autocratic legalism UPenn” will pull up not only Scheppele’s work but also related scholarship by Penn’s own David C. Williams, Eric Feldman, and the late Howard Lesnick—all of whom debated and extended her framework. The keyword “upd” is almost certainly a search engine fragment from “upenn dot edu” or a misspelling of “UPenn.”
A key insight from Scheppele’s updated work is that autocratic legalism does not look like dictatorship; it looks like a messy democracy.
If constitutional changes are the tank and legislation is the artillery, bureaucratic harassment is the sniper fire.