The Autocratic Legal Playbook

By Scott L. Cummings

This Article examines the development and rapid innovation of the autocratic legal playbook in America: the strategic blueprint used to destroy democracy through law. It argues that this playbook, with roots in autocratizing countries abroad, is now being implemented with brutal efficiency in the United States through the unprecedented abuse of executive power. The Article analyzes how autocracy has taken hold of the world’s oldest democracy with such velocity and examines what it means for the future of democracy around the world. It begins by defining the autocratic legal playbook as the roadmap for using law to undermine democratic guardrails that keep the executive within constitutional limits. The Article traces the evolution of the American playbook from Hungary’s autocratic transformation after 2010, to President Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, to Project 2025, to the Trump 2.0 strategy of “flooding the zone” with executive orders. The Article’s central contribution is to reveal the operating principles and tactical innovations of the American playbook—premised on the subversion of truth and the conflation of legitimate policy change with illegitimate democratic attacks—while demonstrating how these principles are being systematically mobilized to target and disable key independent institutions that check executive power: government legal offices, law firms and the bar, courts, administrative agencies, universities, civil society, and the media. Because the core of autocratic legalism is creating the appearance of legality to justify attacks on the rule of law, the Article pays special attention to the legal profession, showing how actions against lawyers and courts are designed to achieve the ultimate autocratic objective: controlling the authority to define law. The Article concludes by considering how to “reverse engineer” the playbook, drawing on critical lessons from how democracies have died, and been resuscitated, in other countries to outline steps for saving American democracy in this watershed moment—before it is too late.

UCLA Law Review, Forthcoming, UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 25-31,