Kim Lane Scheppele
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values
Director, Program in Law and Public Affairs
Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University

Kim Lane Scheppele joined the Princeton faculty in 2005 after nearly a decade on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where she was the John J. O'Brien Professor of Comparative Law, as well as Professor of Sociology. Before that, she taught from 1984-1996 at the University of Michigan, where her primary appointment was in political science, and where she held secondary appointments in the law school and in what has become the Ford School of Public Policy. She is a former LAPA fellow (2004-2005), a former fellow at the Internationales Forchungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna) (1995), a senior fellow at the National Constitution Center (1998-1999), a faculty fellow at the Michigan Institute for the Humanities (1991-1992) and the recipient of multiple grants from the American National Science Foundation for residential field work abroad. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago (1985) and her A.B. in urban studies from Barnard College (1975).

Scheppele concentrates on comparative constitutional law, using ethnographic, historical and doctrinal methods to understand the emergence and collapse of constitutional systems. After 1989, she has focused her attention on the transformation of the countries under Soviet domination into constitutional rule-of-law states. She spent fully half of the years between 1994 and 2004 living in Hungary and then in Russia, studying the Constitutional Courts of each country and examining the ways in which the new constitutions have (or have not) seeped into public consciousness. Her many publications on post-communist constitutional transformation have appeared in law reviews (most recently the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Drake Law Review, and I-Con) and in social science journals (most recently, the Law and Society Review; Law and Courts and the International Journal of Sociology).

Since 9/11, Scheppele has researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world. Her book-in-progress, The International State of Emergency, explores the creation of international security law through UN Security Council resolutions and examines the effect that apparent compliance with these resolutions has had on constitutional integrity. Pieces of the project have already appeared in the Fordham Law Review, the Georgia Law Review, I-Con, the Loyola Law Review and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. She has also worked extensively on the topic of torture after 9/11. Her "Hypothetical Torture in the 'War on Terror'" appeared in the Journal of National Security Law and Policy in 2006.

Her earlier work ranged from the uses of narrative in law, to feminist legal theory, to contractarianism, to critiques of law and economics. Substantively, she has written about constitutional law, tort theory, trade secret law, nondisclosure in contracts, rape and sexual harassment law, and abortion. Her book Legal Secrets (University of Chicago Press, 1988) won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association (1990). It received both the Corwin Prize from the American Political Science Association (1985) and the Rosenberger Prize from the University of Chicago (1987) as a dissertation.

Curriculum Vitae