Abstract: Evidence management is integral to the rule of law, as it may enable or hinder future claims to justice. In response to public criticism over lost and degraded evidence, Norway is transitioning to relocate evidence from all serious crimes from across the nation to a single facility, designating it critical infrastructure. To consider what the transition reveals about the state's relationship to risks and vulnerabilities of evidence, I draw on empirical data from evidence storage facilities. I find that while the new enforcement of authority and order over evidence provides the state with tools to reclaim legitimacy over justice processes, key issues of the past remain unsolved, and the conditions that grant people access to justice remain largely unaffected. Furthermore, a shift in the temporality of evidence occurs, introducing uncertainty to the stored object, whereby the sense of closure that is so central to justice processes may be lost.
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