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.

While the specifics differ by country, the includes a standard set of strategies. These are the danger signals Scheppele has identified:

Recent discussions emphasize parallels in the U.S., particularly regarding attempts to overturn elections through judicial means and the use of executive orders to bypass congressional authority.

: Changing election laws to ensure the leader never leaves office, effectively ending the rotation of power. IV. Case Studies & Updates (2024–2026) Autocratic Legalism - The University of Chicago Law Review autocratic legalism kim lane scheppele upd

: Democracy does not die overnight; it fades through a "death by a thousand cuts," making it hard to identify the exact moment the system becomes autocratic.

Legal and civic countermeasures

In Brazil, scholars have extended Scheppele's framework to analyze the Bolsonaro era. Marina Barreto, in a 2023 article, proposed the concept of "autocratic infra-legalism" to describe how the Bolsonaro administration used administrative legal tools rather than formal constitutional changes to advance its illiberal agenda, offering a counter-argument to Scheppele's original thesis. This academic debate illustrates how Scheppele's framework continues to generate new theoretical developments as scholars apply it to different national contexts. While the specifics differ by country, the includes

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.

Ethical, normative, and scholarly debates

: Requires that laws adhere to substantive liberal principles, including individual rights, institutional checks and balances, and the separation of powers. and Laurent Pech.

At its core, autocratic legalism describes a process where democratically elected leaders use their electoral mandates to dismantle the very democratic institutions that put them in power. Unlike traditional dictators, these leaders don’t break the law; they use the law to break the system.

Scheppele’s diagnosis forced a painful realization: The EU’s famous “Copenhagen criteria” (requiring new members to have stable institutions guaranteeing democracy and rule of law) had no enforcement mechanism once a member backslid legally. The union had weapons against naked coups, but none against constitutions rewritten by majority vote.

(early articulation) or Scheppele, Kim Lane, and Laurent Pech. (2018). "Illiberalism Within: Rule of Law Backsliding in the EU." Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies , Vol. 20, pp. 3–47.

Scheppele developed this concept primarily to analyze the post-2010 trajectories of: