Centre on Criminal Justice and Agency (CJA)
The centre’s core focus lies in fundamental legal concepts concerning agency and criminal responsibility, approached through multidisciplinary, comparative, and empirical research.
About the research centre
The centre is thematically oriented towards complex questions in criminal law and focuses particularly on legal concepts, rules, and practices situated at the intersection between law and other disciplines—such as history, psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy. A central ambition is to advance legal scholarship by employing diverse research methodologies (including empirical approaches) and by integrating insights from other academic fields.
The research focus is on how, and on what basis, criminal law constructs the responsible agents, and what consequences limitations of agency has for the individual and for society. Research in criminal law and criminal justice is at the core, with defendants with mental health conditions and children as two thematic areas. The center will emphasize the interface between different relevant disciplinary perspectives on the phenomena regulated by criminal law.
The centre includes several externally funded projects. Currently, these are the ERC Consolidator Grant project COMPLEX, as well as DIMENSIONS, CHILDCRIM and PROTECT funded by the Research Council of Norway. The centre will provide platforms for synergies across the different projects involved and support the development of new initiatives to secure future research funding and positions.
Forum for Research on Crime, Responsibility and Security
The forum is an essential structure within the centre, and serves as an open research arena with a focal point in criminal law, integrating perspectives from disciplines both within and beyond legal scholarship, including philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, social sciences, and history. Its focus will be to support academic development for students and early-career researchers and to advance legal scholarship by incorporating diverse methodologies. The forum also fosters collaboration across projects and research environments both in Norway and abroad.
Coordinators of the forum are:
- Postdoctoral fellow Lucie Margot Ducarre
- Postdoctoral fellow Martin Mindestrømmen
Featured
Projects
COMPLEX
COMPLEX explores the legal understanding of criminal insanity (and related doctrines), with particular attention to the relevance of mental illness. It takes as its starting point the lack of knowledge about the role of mental disorders in criminal law and is concerned with the epistemic foundations on which the law bases such relevance. Psychiatric diagnoses are often used as the basis for legal assessments, yet they were originally developed for medical treatment—not for judicial decision‑making. COMPLEX aims to generate new knowledge about how the criminal justice system understands and responds to mental disorders. The project will generate new data from 20 countries and integrate philosophy and the mind sciences to develop a new framework for future research.
The project is funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, and led by professor Linda Gröning.
DIMENSIONS
DIMENSIONS examines the model used in Norwegian law for determining criminal responsibility, with particular emphasis on the connection between insanity and psychosis. The project aims to advance the legal understanding of psychotic states and their relevance to criminal insanity by bringing together perspectives from philosophy, law, and medicine. The main collaboration partner is the Centre for Research and Education in Forensic Psychiatry at Haukeland University Hospital.
The project is led by professor Linda Gröning, and funded by The Research Council of Norway.
CHILDCRIM
CHILDCRIM examines assessments of criminal insanity and violence risk in children who are above the age of criminal responsibility. The project includes both psychiatric and legal evaluations of children in criminal cases conducted by expert witnesses and judges, and aims to integrate research on children’s rights, child development, and mental disorders. Its goal is to identify needs for revised legal regulation and further knowledge development. The main collaboration partner is the Centre for Research and Education in Forensic Psychiatry at Haukeland University Hospital.
The project is led by Linda Gröning, and is supported by the Research Council of Norway.
PROTECT
PROTECT explores the interface between criminal law and child welfare in relation to interventions targeting children who commit, or become involved in, serious harmful acts. The project has an overarching conceptual focus on how the best interests of the child can be understood and integrated with considerations of societal protection. Building on this premise, the project also includes comparative and empirical investigations of how the Nordic welfare states balance children’s rights, crime prevention, and public safety.
The project focuses on two key institutions involved in responding to children who commit crime: the child welfare system and the criminal justice system. PROTECT is interdisciplinary, combining insights from political science, law, and social work. The main collaboration partner is the Department of Government at the University of Bergen.
The project is led by Linda Gröning and Marit Skivenes (Department of Government), and funded by the Research Council of Norway.
People
Centre manager
Linda Gröning Centre leader
Stephen Mathis Centre research coordinator
Centre members
Slavka Dimitrova Associate Professor II
Lucie Margot Ducarre Postdoctoral fellow
Ingun Fornes Professor
Ronnie Mackay Researcher
Martin Mindestrømmen Postdoctoral fellow
Emma Reian PhD Candidate
Camilla Patiño Salazar Research Assistant
Naomi van de Pol Researcher
International advisory board
Associated members
Johannes Bijlsma Associate Professor, Utrecht University (COMPLEX)
Daniil Butenko Researcher, Helse Bergen (DIMENSIONS)
Kevin S. Douglas Researcher, Helse Bergen (CHILDCRIM)
Siri Gloppen Professor, Department of Government, University og Bergen (PROTECT)
Unn K. Haukvik Professor, Adult Psychiatry Unit, University of Oslo (DIMENSIONS)
Kari Øverland Helse Bergen (CHILDCRIM)
Maj-Britt Posserud Professor, Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Bergen (CHILDCRIM)
Susanna Radovic Senior Lecturer, University of Gothenburg (DIMENSIONS)
Marit Skivenes Professor, Depertment of Government, University of Bergen (PROTECT)
Contact
Centre on Criminal Justice and Agency is led by Professor Linda Gröning. The research coordinator is senior researcher Stephen Mathis.
- Emails
- cja-centre@uib.no