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LIT-1604: Autocratic Legalism

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1390) in full, from the University of Chicago Law Review's own PDF (the Chicago Unbound copy returned a Cloudflare 403); worth reading as the profile of elected leaders who capture courts, election bodies and media by constitutional amendment, legislation and appointment, borrowing tactics from one another and avoiding the signals of twentieth-century tyranny. Read it knowing that it is a symposium essay built from case narratives, that the leaders' intent and the borrowing are inferred, not shown, that its autocrats change the standards and the correctors rather than only the cost of correction, and that its remedy is a page on civic education.
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Tagssociety-and-governance
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1390 — Scheppele — Autocratic legalism

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Scheppele, K. L. (2018). Autocratic legalism. The University of Chicago Law Review, 85(2), 545–583.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1390), from the University of Chicago Law Review’s own copy.

Why this is here

A8 put it beside the historical cases “as an important competing explanation of strategic institutional behavior”: a self-reinforcing loop is not the same explanation as the deliberate use of legal procedure to weaken accountability. CLAIM-464 is stated so that it does not choose between them.

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