Kim Lane Scheppele

Professor Kim Lane Scheppele in October 2016

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.^[1] Scheppele joined the Princeton faculty in 2005, after nearly a decade as the John J. O'Brien Professor of Comparative Law and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she is still a faculty fellow.^[2]

Scheppele is an expert on authoritarian regimes,^[3] as well as Hungarian politics and law.^[4]

Scheppele worked in Hungary in the 1990s,^[5] during which she met Viktor Orban.^[4]

Now a leading critic of the Viktor Orban government,^[4][6] she has called its actions as creating an "unconstitutional constitution,",^[7] and that Hungarian democracy is in jeopardy.^[4] She called Tünde Handó a "judicial Czar" whose role damaged the independence of the Hungarian judiciary.^[5] Scheppele also called a proposed constitutional rewrite in 2013 “a toxic waste dump of bad constitutional ideas”, which prompted Fidesz MEP György Schöpflin to attack her claims on the basis of political animosity.^[8]

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