Kim Lane Scheppele
is Professor of Law, Political Science and
Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she moved officially in 1996 after
spending 12 years in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan
(with appointments in the School of Public Policy, the department of sociology, the
women's studies program and the law school). During her time at Michigan, she also held
the Arthur F. Thurnau Chair as Associate Professor of Political Science. From
1994-1998, she resided principally in Budapest where she spent two years (thanks to grants
from the American National Science Foundation) carrying out a research project on the new
constitutionalism at the Constitutional Court of Hungary. Between 1996-1998, she was
co-chair of the new department of gender studies at the Central European University in
Budapest, the first place in the post-Soviet world to give graduate degrees in gender
studies. She is currently working on three books: one on the development of
"courtocracy" in the aftermath of state socialism, one on abortion in
comparative constitutional law, and one on legal fictions and the interpretation of legal
facts. Scheppele has been an active member of the Law and Society Association since
1980. She was chair of the membership committee from 1985-1987, program committee
member for the first international meetings held in Amsterdam in 1990, a member of the
Board of Trustees from 1990-1993, a member of the Nominating Committee in 1994 and a
member of the long-range planning committee from 1991-1993 and again starting in 1998. She
has taught in the Graduate Student Workshop (1990) and in the Summer Institute (1996).
Outside the Law and Society Association, she has been active in keeping sociolegal
scholarship alive by being a founding organizer of the Conference Group on Jurisprudence
and Public Law within the American Political Science Association (starting in 1985) and a
founding organizer of the Sociology of Law section of the American Sociological
Association (where she was section chair in 1994-1995). She is the author of Legal
Secrets, which received special recognition in the Distinguished Contribution to
Scholarship prize competition of the American Sociological Association, and has published
many articles on subjects ranging from legal narrative and insider trading to feminist
jurisprudence and the rule of law. She received her PhD in sociology from the University
of Chicago in 1985.