Louise Victoria Johansen

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Copenhagen

This paper explores how Danish legal professionals assess the trustworthiness of victims in criminal cases based on emotional expressions. It focuses on the alignment of these expressions with the nature of the crime, the social context, and the victims’ social identities, and is based on findings from several ethnographic projects involving extens...

This article explores how criminal justice actors interpret and process victims’ emotional expressions. On the basis of a qualitative study on the interactions between legal institutions and victims of violence in Denmark, the article demonstrates how police officers, prosecutors, victims’ counsel and judges each separately understand and evaluate...

This article combines the analytical perspectives ‘legal’ and ‘penal’ consciousness in order to analyse how ethnic minority prisoners in remand anticipate their upcoming court trial and how they subsequently make sense of the legal process and their sentence. Based on fieldwork in a Danish remand prison and courts, the study explores how prisoners’...

Lay participation in criminal trials has primarily been studied in common law systems, thereby mainly focusing on the separate role of juries. These studies have provided detailed accounts of language use between jurors during deliberation as well as their use of storytelling techniques and common-sense reasoning in decision-making. However, only f...

This article investigates the framework for compensating rape victims in Denmark, focusing on the interplay between legislation, victim lawyers' roles, and institutional practices, particularly those of the Victim Compensation Board (VCB). Grounded in legal, qualitative, and quantitative analyses, I focus specifically on the roles of victim's lawye...

Like many other jurisdictions, the Danish criminal justice system has used pre-sentence reports for almost a century to be able to impose individualised sanctions. During this period, suspended sentences and a range of alternative sanctions have been developed, and the number of pre-sentence reports issued has increased dramatically accordingly. Th...

This article compares the ways in which judges in Denmark communicate punishment to defendants in common assault cases, and in very serious cases where the prosecution has claimed an indeterminate sentence. Danish judges generally take on a reserved role during trial, and they depend on a range of other professionals to make their judgement, thus ‘...

Expectations surrounding defendants ’ emotive responses have been studied most extensively in the context of courtrooms as spaces that invite very limited emotional expressions while categorising others as entirely undesirable. This chapter, however, takes its point of departure at an earlier stage in the criminal process: at the probation service,...

Criminal policy processes often appear abstract and illusive, but sometimes a single criminal incident causes traceable policy impact. This article is about such an incident. A victim of a grave, violent assault published an opinion piece in a national newspaper, which sparked considerable public debate and policy actions. Some policy actions were...

During the period 2018 to 2020, we followed 60 victims of crime and interviewed them at various stages of the judicial process from their first meeting with police until the conclusion of their cases. In this article, we analyze our interviews using Arnold Van Gennep’s and Victor W. Turner’s theoretical frameworks on rites de passage and social dra...

This paper describes how victims of violence experience their initial meeting with the Danish police and the time that follows. Based on observations of police-victim encounters and interviews with victims, we explore how victims’ rights are brought into play when victims report crimes to the police. Such rights are meant to help victims cope with...

While there is abundant research on common law jury systems, we know less about lay participation in civil law crime trials, often called ‘mixed courts’ or alternately ‘mixed tribunals'. Here, a professional judge and a number of lay judges deliberate together on the issues of guilt and sentencing. This joint deliberation has naturally led both pub...

Emotions constitute an integrated part of crime trials, but the evaluation of these emotions is dependent on broader cultural norms rarely addressed by legal practitioners. Previous research on emotions in the judiciary has also tended to underemphasize this cultural dimension of judges’ assessment of defendants’ emotional expressions. This article...

Jury systems rest on the notion that not only specialized judges, but also “ordinary” people should judge defendants. Lay judges are supposed to contribute with their mundane, common sense, untouched by legal reasoning and knowledge.These ideals are also prevalent in Denmark. However, Danish lay judges are appointed for a four-year period and may e...

This article analyses how the Danish penal system uses pre-sentence reports to constitute defendants as persons in relation to their criminal acts. Based on ethnographic fieldwork within the Danish Probation Service and County Courts, the present study follows the ‘career’ of these documents and shows how meaning is created through the complex inte...

Jurastuderende på danske universiteter bliver i stigende grad introduceret for tværfaglig undervisning, som giver dem mulighed for at kunne reflektere over deres fag udefra. Mange jurastuderende møder dog disse kurser med en stærk monofaglig forståelse opnået gennem deres hidtidige jurastudium. Deres læreproces i løbet af kurserne er derfor afhængi...

Traditionally, anthropologists have sympathized with marginalized objects of study – people who do not have the power to speak for themselves. Acting as advocates of subordinate groups has thus seemed much more attractive to anthropologists than studying institutions and powerful informants. Though many recent studies of Western institutions and el...