Professor Kim Scheppele has spent much of her career watching democracies rise and fall. She went to Hungary in the early 1990s expecting to study democratic optimism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, decades later, she found herself documenting how constitutional democracy can be dismantled from the inside out.

That experience frames a wide-ranging conversation on the latest episode of Stanford Legal, where host Professor Pam Karlan speaks with Scheppele, the Lawrence S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton and a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, about how democracies crumble, and why the United States is not exempt.

Drawing on years of on-the-ground research in Hungary, Russia, and other countries, Scheppele explains a central shift in democratic collapse: it no longer arrives through overt rupture, but through elections followed by legal and constitutional maneuvering. Leaders campaign as democrats, win office, and then use technical changes to the law, including court rules, budgetary controls, and civil-service structures, to weaken checks and rig the system in their favor.

The discussion turns to the United States, examining how party polarization, shifting institutional loyalties, and expanding claims of executive power have made familiar safeguards less reliable than many assumed.

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(00:08:17) Patterns abroad and at home—are U.S. checks in danger?

(00:15:04) Naming the playbook

(00:32:07) More litigation—access, risk, and the pace of change

(00:32:39) Restoring democracy through law

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