Julia Hänni appointed honorary professor

1 February 2020. Dr Julia Hänni was born on 29 May 1977 in Zurich. She is a Swiss citizen.

She studied law at the University of Zurich from 2000 to 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a PhD in law at the University of St. Gallen with a thesis on the philosophy of law, which was awarded the Professor Walter Hug Prize of the University of St. Gallen for the best legal thesis of the academic year 2010 as well as the Walter Hug Prize Switzerland. In 2009, she researched at the MPI for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. In 2013, she was a Global Justice Fellow at Yale University in New Haven CT, USA.

After working from 2006 to 2010 as a research assistant at the Chair of Constitutional, Administrative and European Law under Prof. Dr Tobias Jaag at the University of Zurich and as an assistant at the Chair of Legal History, Sociology of Law and Criminal Law under Prof. Dr Lukas Gschwend at the University of St. Gallen, she became senior assistant at the Institute for European Law at the University of Fribourg i.Ü. From 2012 to 2016, she was a clerk at the Swiss Federal Supreme Court and served as personal assistant to federal judges Dr Andreas Zünd (2012), Dr Lorenz Kneubühler (2012-2014) and Stephan Haag (2014-2016). In 2016, she was appointed assistant professor of public law with a focus on energy law and European law as well as the philosophy of law at the University of Lucerne. In 2019, the United Federal Assembly appointed Julia Hänni as a full-time federal judge at the Swiss Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne.

Many years of teaching experience

Federal judge Dr Julia Hänni has many years of teaching experience. From 2010 to 2012, she held lectureships in public law at the University of Freiburg i.Ü.; from 2012 to 2015, she held lectureships in public law, European law and philosophy of law at the Universities of Zurich and Lucerne and at an Indonesian university (National Hindu Dharma Institute, Denpasar). Since 2014, she has been teaching philosophy of law at the University of St.Gallen. She supervises seminar papers and master's theses as well as doctoral theses as a co-examiner.

Philosophy of law, European law & public law

Federal judge Dr Julia Hänni has an extensive list of publications under her belt. Besides her doctoral thesis "Vom Gefühl am Grund der Rechtsfindung. Rechtsmethodik, Objektivität und Emotionalität in der Rechtsanwendung", she has published both a textbook on European law (with Prof. Tobias Jaag) and, most recently, one on the philosophy of law. She has also written over 30 articles in journals, anthologies and commentaries and is the editor of nine works to date. In addition to numerous articles on the subject of public law as well as international and European law, there are several publications at the interface between public law and the philosophy of law, such as human rights violations due to climate change (Europäische Grundrechtezeitschrift 2019). The list of publications by federal judge Dr Julia Hänni includes in particular numerous substantial studies on the philosophy of law. These include the phenomenology of legal decision making, emotion and law or sense of justice and intuition, legal hermeneutics and philosophy of language, value philosophy and Asian legal philosophy, and biomedical law. In her research, federal judge Dr Julia Hänni combines the philosophy of law with legal doctrinal and practical legal issues.