Interviews in Global Catholic Studies

MS: Okay, So first can you describe your intellectual journey, and what brought you to canon law?JH: Hmm, yeah, I started studying theology, and I think I developed during my studies, yeah, kind of a fascination with norms, really.Norms are facts, but they are a peculiar kind of fact.And I got interested in how social facts, and normsof social facts, really built up rule systems, particularly complex ones such as the Catholic church.And then I was interested in theological disciplines dealing with all kinds of normativities.Then I was lucky enough to get a job as a student assistant working in social ethics at an institute that dealt with the ethics of economy and society.And I started studying canon law, just to get more grasp on normativities, I guess.And then this kind of continued; I met a nice professor, a panel professor, who said I could do a PhD in canon caw.And then I did that, and then I was lucky enough to get a tenured position as a junior professor, this a very specific German thing I guess, in Boham in 2010.And it was tenured, so it kind of continued from there.Then I got what in the American system would be an associate professorship in 2015, and then the full professorship.So it's kind of, yeah, there are a lot of coincidences which lead to that, but I think at the bottom of it is my interest in how do complex normative systems, such as the Catholic Church, with all this layers of normativity, moral, social, legal and so on, how do they work?MS: So then, I mean, that leads to the next question, and you've partially answered it, how would you characterize canon law, both its study and its practice?JH: Yeah, that's an interesting question.I don't think there's an homogeneous thing that we can call canon law.I mean we have various disciplinary approaches to canon law, really.I mean, just yesterday I read an article by a colleague who's a legal historian; he deals with medieval canon law, so he deals with canon law quite a lot, but he's a legal scholar

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