Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, political activist, and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, joined Princeton legal scholars Robert P. George and Kim Lane Scheppele, as well as Guatemalan whistleblowing judge Claudia Escobar, to discuss the state of the rule of law at home and abroad. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderated. 

This event was hosted in partnership with the National Constitution Center and the University of Pennsylvania’s Paideia Program.

Participants:

Garry Kasparov is chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative. Now a Russian dissident in exile, he is a former world chess champion and Russian opposition politician. He is the author of several books, including Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. He also serves as the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation.

Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

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.

Claudia Escobar is a legal scholar and former magistrate of the Court of Appeals of Guatemala. Following her second election to the Court of Appeals in 2014, she became the lead whistleblower in a case of grand corruption that revealed illegal interference in Guatemala’s judiciary by high-ranking political officials including the country’s vice-president and the former president of congress. Following a series of threats she received from the Guatemalan government, Escobar left Guatemala for the United States in 2015 to continue her legal work and advocacy for judicial independence.