黑料网爆吃瓜

The Yan P. Lin Centre proudly presents its 2026 Annual Lecture, 鈥淐ounter-Constitutions: On Being the Object of a Coup鈥� given by聽Kim Scheppele (Princeton) at the 黑料网爆吃瓜 Faculty Club Ballroom on March 19th at 4:30 PM. A reception will follow.聽

Abstract: Many of us believed Donald Trump when he said that he would be a dictator on day one. But many American voters did not 鈥� and they elected him to an office that the US Supreme Court had just said would make its occupant immune from criminal prosecution. In one year, Donald Trump has transformed the US Constitution into its opposite. He and his 鈥淢AGA鈥� team have neutralized the congress, ignored the courts and created the largest police force in the world. This police force rolls into cities and displaces their local authorities, snatching people off the streets and out of their homes, ignoring constitutional requirements. This police force kills, maims and tortures without conscience because the prosecution service prosecutes only critics of this president and not those who commit crimes in his name. Constitutional rights in America聽 -- from basic liberty to free speech to equality before the law 鈥� have been turned upside down. Violence does not stop at the border. Trump has bombed multiple countries, killed people in small boats who are not part of any armed conflict, authorized a military operation to kidnap a head of state and appropriate its natural resources 鈥� and now threatens to annex by force territory belonging to an ally.聽聽 In this last year, America has experienced a coup, brought about by an election, aided and abetted by a packed Supreme Court and now held in place by open violence. In this lecture, I will discuss the 鈥渃ounter-constitution鈥� under which Americans now live 鈥� and what hope there may be for democratic recovery.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and Director of the Program in Law and Normative Thinking at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Scheppele's work focuses on the rise and fall of constitutional democracy. After 1989, Scheppele studied the new constitutional courts of Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world. Since 2010, she has been documenting attacks on constitutional democracy by legalistic autocrats. Her book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

Scheppele is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Comparative Law. In 2014, she received the Law and Society Association鈥檚 Kalven Prize for influential scholarship in comparative constitutional law and in 2024, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on democratic backsliding. She was President of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019.

Scheppele started her career in the political science department at the University of Michigan in 1984 before moving to the law school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 and then joining Princeton in 2005. She was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest and has held visiting faculty positions in the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, Humboldt/Berlin and, in fall 2025, Stanford.