Constitution after coup: United States - a Rule of Law Forum series

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 and she will be a visiting professor at Stanford Law School in fall 2025. 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’s Kalven Prize for influential scholarship in comparative constitutional law and in 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on democratic backsliding. She started her career in the political science department at the University of Michigan before moving to a full-time professorship in the law school at the University of Pennsylvania. 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, and Humboldt/Berlin. She was President of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019.

Derek J. T. Adler is a Partner of Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP who represents non-US clients in complex commercial disputes, white-collar criminal and regulatory matters in the United States. Mr. Adler is a graduate of Columbia College and The Fordham University School of Law, where he served on the editorial board of the Fordham Law Review. Prior to joining Hughes Hubbard & Reed, Mr. Adler had been an associate in the litigation department of Skadden in New York and an Assistant in the Banking and International Litigation Section of Herbert Smith in London. He was awarded an LLM with merit from London University (London School of Economics), which he attended as a Fulbright Scholar.

Alka Pradhan is an expert on the application of human rights and humanitarian law to counterterrorism situations, and the impact of torture on fair trials. She is currently Human Rights Counsel at the Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions, representing one of the defendants in the capital case of United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (the “9/11 case”), and Associate Counsel in the Al Hassan case at the International Criminal Court. Ms. Pradhan was a member of the Drafting Committee of the Principles of Effective Interviewing (the "Mendez Principles").