Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen

Arntzen began her career as a consultant at the Ministry of Justice and the Police's Legal Issues section. From 1989 to 2003, she was a lawyer at the Office of the Attorney General of Norway. She attained to barrister, a lawyer with access to work with Supreme Court cases, in 1993. She then entered the law firm Kluge as a lawyer and partner. Since 2007 Arntzen has been a judge at Oslo District Court.^[2]

Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen belongs to a family with many jurists. Among them is her grandfather, former Director of Public Prosecutions in Norway (Norwegian: riksadvokat) Sven Arntzen. Her father was the barrister, Andreas Arntzen.^[4] She is also married to a jurist and is a cousin of psychology professor Erik Arntzen.

Since 2009, Arntzen has been a member of the Norwegian Parliamentary Intelligence Oversight Committee.^[5] She has also worked at the University of Oslo as commissioned lecturer in ethics.^[2]

During the opening of the 2012 trial against Anders Behring Breivik, Breivik claimed that judge Arntzen was a personal friend of Hanne Harlem, sister of former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, whom Breivik on day four of the trial testified had been a principal target for execution during his shooting spree at Utøya island—and whom he had wanted to decapitate on video, Al Qaeda-style—but to the question from Arntzen whether this constituted a formal assertion of conflict of interest, Breivik's main defence counsel Geir Lippestad, after cursorily conferring with Breivik, replied that it was not.^[6][7][8]