Most of us know that Peter Magyar decisively defeated Viktor Urban in the election yesterday in Hungary. But Who is Magyar? What does the future hold? What lessons does it have for our elections in the US?
Below is a videotape from Deutschwelle (the German state funded radio and television network) in English, interviewing Kim Lane Scheppele. From the Princeton Department of Sociology:
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She also works in sociological theory, comparative/historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of knowledge and human rights.
Professor Scheppele’s research examines the rise and fall of constitutional government. After 1989, she moved to Eastern Europe, living in Hungary and Russia for extended periods, studying the way that new constitutions were being enacted and entrenched. After 9/11, she examined how constitutions fared under the stress of anti-terrorism campaigns with their repressive new laws, both in the United States and elsewhere. After the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, she has studied the way that democracies have come under stress, focusing on the rise of new autocrats, particularly those who are elected on populist political platforms and who then use the law to undermine constitutional institutions. Now, she concentrates in particular on changes within the European Union – exploring the way that the EU has had difficulty holding its own against national popular movements that brought about Brexit and the rise of illiberal autocracies among the member states. She has published widely in both social science and law journals, in both Europe and the US. She is a frequent commentator on the Verfassungsblog.
Professor Scheppele’s work has been widely recognized. In 2014, she received the Kalven Prize from the Law and Society Association for scholarship that has had an important influence on the development of socio-legal studies, and in 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and serves as a “global jurist” on the executive committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law. She served as the elected president of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019. Her book, Legal Secrets, won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association as well as the Corwin Prize of the American Political Science Association.
