Copyright

Linda Gröning; Svein Atle Skålevåg

Published On

2026-03-02

Page Range

pp. 101–130

Language

  • English

Print Length

30 pages

3. A Legal History of Intelligence, Testing, and Criminal Unaccountability

Chapter of: Historicizing IQ Testing: Intelligence Assessments and their Role in Norwegian Society from the 1900s to the Present(pp. 101–130)
This chapter looks at how intelligence testing at times seems to have been associated with a utopian promise of turning the slippery issue of criminal accountability, into a calculable object. The chapter discusses intellectual disability and criminal unaccountability (cf. criminal insanity) in Norwegian criminal law in the long twentieth century, through an analysis of legal-political documents regarding criminal law reforms in the relevant period. These documents, produced by politicians, legal and forensic experts, are by their nature normative and future oriented, but they also constitute a good source for assessing conceptualisations implicit in medico-legal thinking. We are particularly interested in identifying the effect that intelligence testing, when introduced, had on the implicit concepts of intelligence and criminal unaccountability. By analysing the operative concept of intelligence in the criminal law discourse we furthermore aim to broaden the understanding of the history of intelligence testing in a historiography where studies of its emergence and application in a school context has dominated, and the context of criminal law has been all but ignored.

Contributors

Linda Gröning

(author)
Professor in law; Senior researcher at University of Bergen
Senior Researcher at the Centre for Research and Education in Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology at University of Oslo
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2864-3545

Linda Gröning is a professor in law, University of Bergen, and senior researcher at the Centre for Research and Education in Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen. Gröning has a research focus on criminal responsibility and the legal relevance of mental disorders and disabilities, with an emphasis on comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. She has published extensively on this topic.

Svein Atle Skålevåg

(author)
https://orcid.org/0009-0004-2392-9274

Svein Atle Skålevåg, professor in the department of archaeology, history, cultural studies and religion, University of Bergen. Skålevåg teaches history of science at the University of Bergen and has for many years been researching the history of psychiatry and in particular of forensic science. He has written Utilregnelighet. En historie om rett og medisin, a book length study of the history of criminal insanity in forensic psychiatry and law in Norway from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.