Kim Lane Scheppele joined the Princeton faculty in 2005 as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values and Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs.
For nearly a decade she was on the Penn Law faculty where she was the John J. O’Brien Professor of Comparative Law and 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).