A remotely recorded podcast with Professor Kathryn Hendley (Law Repository), Roman Z. Livshits & Theodore W. Brazeau Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Prof. Hendley joins the Wisconsin Law in Action podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on how law actually functions in the real world — from the courts of post-Soviet Russia to the pressures facing legal institutions in the United States today. Drawing on decades of fieldwork, Hendley challenges the comfortable assumption that authoritarian legal systems are uniformly broken. As she puts it, “one of the myths that we have is that law works perfectly in this country and it doesn’t work at all in authoritarian regimes.” Her research reveals a more complicated truth: even under repressive governments, ordinary people navigate courts, settle disputes, and seek legal remedies in ways that look surprisingly familiar. Her concept of the “dual legal system” — where mundane, everyday law coexists alongside political repression — offers a framework that reframes how we think about justice across very different societies.
Prof. Hendley also examines what happens to lawyers and judges when democracy backslides, and what the United States can learn by looking abroad. Hendley draws on cases from Poland, Hungary, Russia, and beyond to illuminate the “toolkit of autocrats” — court-packing, constitutional manipulation, and the quiet use of economic pressure rather than outright intimidation while also discussing how American-trained lawyers are trained to question and push back, which may be needed in moments such as these.
The interview was conducted on January 21, 2026 | 35:29 minutes; published March 6, 2026. Transcript file (PDF).
Link to the Podcast: Soundcloud | Apple Podcast