Laws are passed through proper parliamentary procedures. Courts issue written opinions. Appeals are available. Yet the substantive effect is to entrench ruling-party power beyond electoral reach.
: 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
For students, activists, and scholars typing “autocratic legalism kim lane scheppele upd” into search bars late at night, the answer awaits in her formidable corpus: begin with Autocratic Legalism (2018), then read The Rule of Law and the Eurocrisis (2015), then the Hungary and Poland chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law. But also read the dissents—the judges fired in Budapest, the professors investigated in Warsaw, the civil servants purged in Ankara. Their stories are the data points. Scheppele gave us the regression line. Laws are passed through proper parliamentary procedures
To protect democratic stability, we must look beyond the "legality" of a leader's actions and scrutinize whether those actions preserve or perish the democratic soul of the nation. Yet the substantive effect is to entrench ruling-party
Mechanisms and toolkit of autocratic legalism
Autocratic Legalism: How Democracies Die by the Letter of the Law