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<span class="vcard">Melissa Hooper</span>

Melissa Hooper

Guest Author

Melissa Hooper is a lawyer, a rule of law expert, and the Deputy Director of Strategic Democracy Initiatives at the German Marshall Fund.

Ms. Hooper’s research focuses on lessons for lawyers, judges, and other pro-democracy actors across international backsliding environments, accountability, and rule of law reconstruction after periods of backsliding. She has spent over fifteen years tracking and analyzing democracy, rule of law, and rights developments and policy in Central Europe, Russia and Ukraine, and has testified in Congress repeatedly on these issues.

Ms. Hooper is the author of Autocratizing Fast and Slow (June 2026, Brookings), an analysis of lessons from democratic actors during the process of autocratization, including from Hungary, Georgia, Brazil, Turkey, and Poland; Degrees of Freedom, Measuring Democracy in the World and the United States (Feb 2026, Edley Center on Law and Democracy, UC Berkeley); and Turning Back the Tide of Authoritarianism: International Lessons for the U.S. Legal Community (Jan. 2026, Harvard Social Impact Review).

Articles by this author:

A protester shouts slogans and gestures by a picture of Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro stuck on wheelbarrow, as a symbol of dismissal, during a demonstration in front of the Polish Parliament as Polish Senators decide about new bill changing the judiciary system, in Warsaw, on July 21, 2017 (Photo by WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

If President Trump is Concerned With the Entry of “Criminal Aliens,” Why Is the U.S. Welcoming Corrupt Foreign Officials?

May 15, 2026
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (C) walks near other representatives during a vote about the government's bill on the protection against the new coronavirus COVID-19 at the plenary session of the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest, Hungary on March 30, 2020.

Threats to Democracy Spread with the Virus, We Must Keep Both in Check

Apr. 1, 2020
A statute of Poland’s 17th-century monarch King Sigismund III Vasa covered with a chasuble reading the word "Constitution" on September 17, 2018.

Did the ECJ Just Give a Stamp of Approval to Poland’s Backsliding?

Oct. 10, 2019 and
People demonstrate to support the Polish Supreme Court Justice president in front of the Supreme Court building, on July 4, 2018 in Warsaw.

To Wrest Back Rule of Law in Poland, Might EU Bureaucracy Finally Work?

Apr. 10, 2019

Protesters in Hungary Call Out Labor Rights – and Rule of Law

Dec. 20, 2018

Polish Government’s Power Trip Interrupted?

Oct. 25, 2018

Poland: Failing at Both Law and Justice

Jul. 16, 2018

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