Judith Hahn
Canon Law Research and Teaching with a Focus on the Sociology of Canon Law, the Theory of Canon Law, Law and Religion, Law as Culture, and Law and Language
Neue Bücher | New Books
Zusammenfassung: Was macht die Kanonistik als wissenschaftliche Disziplin aus? Ist sie Theologie oder Rechtswissenschaft? Und wie wirkt sich die jeweilige Verortung methodologisch aus? Judith Hahn und Adrian Loretan bieten unterschiedliche Perspektiven auf diese Grundlagenfragen ihres Fachs. Sie zeigen, was Kirchenrechtswissenschaft gegenwärtig leisten kann und leisten muss, und geben damit wichtige Impulse für eine Reform der Disziplin und des kirchlichen Rechts.
Abstract: “Sacramentality” can serve as a category that helps to understand the performative power of religious and legal rituals. Through the analysis of “sacraments”, one can observe how law uses sacramentality to change reality through performative action, and how religion uses law to organise religious rituals, including sacraments. The study of sacramental action thus shows how law and religion intertwine to produce legal, spiritual, and other social effects. In this volume, the author explores this interplay by interpreting the Catholic sacraments as examples of sacro-legal symbols that draw on the sacramental functioning of the law to provide both spiritual and legal goods to church members. By focusing on sacro-legal symbols from the perspective of sacramental theology, legal studies, ritual theory, symbol theory, and speech act theory, the study reveals how law and religion work hand in hand to shape our social reality.
Abstract: This study explores the language of canon law. It seeks to bring the language of canon law into the law and language debate and in doing so better understand how the Roman Catholic Church communicates as a legal institution. It examines the function of canon law language in ecclesiastical communications. It studies the character of canonical language, the grammar and terminology of canon law, and how it makes use of linguistic tricks and techniques to create its typical sound. It discusses the comprehension difficulties that arise out of ambiguities in the law, out of transfer problems between legal and common language, and out of canon law’s confusing mix of legal, doctrinal, and moral norms. It reviews the potential consequences of a plain language agenda in the church. This includes an evaluation of whether dead Latin is the appropriate language for a global and cross-cultural legal order such as canon law, and a discussion of how to improve multi-language communication. The book also takes a closer look at ecclesiastical interpretation theory. It examines forensic language, the language of ecclesiastical tribunals, in its problematic shifting between orality and textuality.
Current Project: Glocal Laws
My study Glocal Laws: Global Catholicism, Canon Law, and the Local Churches is a theoretical study which seeks to analyse the current status of global Catholic canon law as law emanating from the Roman centre of Catholicism and its application in the local churches across the world. A law deeply impregnated by the continental legal tradition is being applied in churches with both civil and common law backgrounds, in city parishes and rural areas, and in cultural contexts which embrace the law as a medium of organising the social and in contexts where law enjoys less support. This gives rise to manifold conflicts, frequently making the law of the church less of an instrument for ordering the social and of solving conflicts—and more an instrument for creating and nurturing misunderstanding and disagreement. Canonists are aware of these challenges from their own observations, from educated guessing, and from the complaints raised by many Catholics throughout the world. As yet, however, there is no study which collects these diverse observations and uses them to construct a single overall picture (1) which systematises the conflicts connected with the church’s claim of covering a worldwide church with a uniform law; (2) analyses the reasons for these conflicts in light of existing research on legal pluralism, legal transplants and legal colonialism; (3) and discusses the question if, in light of these findings, there can be a future for a global body of ecclesiastical laws. By raising these questions, my study also contributes to the ongoing and intense debate on legal universalism, which is particularly viral in the field of human rights and which asks whether there can be global normative orders without reproducing colonialist patterns of normative transfer that impose alien norms on other cultures.
The project is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation as part of the Opus magnum funding scheme.