Janet Ajzenstat

Janet Leslie Ajzenstat ( MacDonald;

In 1959, she married philosopher and future fellow McMaster professor Samuel Ajzenstat.

Ajzenstat died on 27 May 2025, at the age of 89. A review of The Political Thought of Lord Durham described the book "as a bold revisionist analysis of Durham's political thought and as a clear defence of mainstream liberalism in the face of attempts to enshrine Quebec's 'distinctiveness' in Canadian federalism".

Ajzenstat also contends that so-called "judicial activism" undercuts the foundation of responsible government. For example, in Once and Future Canadian Democracy, she wrote about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: "We forgot that parliaments have an interest in securing rights. We began to think of parliaments as tyrants, ever ready to trespass on the citizen’s liberties, to invade the sphere of private rights. And we began to think of the courts and the courts alone as guardians of our precious rights and liberties". As a result, her work is well received by conservative scholars, such as Stephen Harper's former chief of staff Ian Brodie and political scientist Barry Cooper; the latter wrote in a review of Canada's Founding Debates, "This is revisionist history at its best".

Ajzenstat's work was the subject of two chapters in Canadian Conservative Political Thought (2023), edited by Lee Trepanier and Richard Avramenko.

Awards Ajzenstat was a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (2002), the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History (2009), and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012).