Greg Janzen

Greg Janzen is a criminal defence and appellate lawyer at KJR Law. He was called to the Bar of Alberta in 2018 and is a member in good standing of the Law Society of Alberta. He has conducted trials in the Alberta Court of Justice and the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta, and has argued summary conviction and sentence appeals before the Court of King’s Bench and conviction appeals before the Alberta Court of Appeal.

Greg obtained his JD from Osgoode Hall Law School and has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Calgary. At Osgoode, he focused his coursework on criminal law and human rights law and received, among other awards, the Honourable Wallace Nesbitt Memorial Scholarship and the National Association of Japanese Canadians & Roger Sachio Obata C.M. Prize in International Human Rights Law.

Before entering legal practice, Greg was a philosophy instructor at the University of Calgary and Mount Royal University, teaching a variety of courses at both introductory and advanced levels. Since 2020 he has been a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary, where he teaches jurisprudence.

Criminal law is highly procedural, and the difference in outcome between two files with similar facts often turns on procedural detail: how the Crown’s case was investigated, whether disclosure is complete, whether there has been a Charter violation, or whether the Crown’s election affects the range of available defences. Greg approaches each file by working through these procedural issues methodically, identifying defences that may not be obvious at first, and developing the legal arguments that flow from them.