The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Law,
#51
Louis Freeh
#710
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Louis Joseph Freeh is an American attorney and former judge who served as the fifth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from September 1993 to June 2001. Graduated from Rutgers University and New York University School of Law, Freeh began his career as a special agent in the FBI, and was later an Assistant United States Attorney and United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. A Republican, he was later appointed as FBI director by President Bill Clinton. He is now a lawyer and consultant in the private sector.
Go to Profile#52
Richard Goldstone
#2165
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Richard Joseph Goldstone is a South African former judge. After working for 17 years as a commercial lawyer, he was appointed by the South African government to serve on the Transvaal Supreme Court from 1980 to 1989 and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa from 1990 to 1994.
Go to Profile#53
Robert P. George
#1874
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#54
Shirin Ebadi
#350
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian Nobel laureate, lawyer, writer, teacher and a former judge and founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. In 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her pioneering efforts for democracy and women's, children's, and refugee rights. She was the first Muslim woman and the first Iranian to receive the award.
Go to Profile#55
Philip Alston
#1323
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Philip Geoffrey Alston is an Australian international law scholar and human rights practitioner. He is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, and co-chair of the law school's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. In human rights law, Alston has held a range of senior UN appointments for over two decades, including United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, a position he held from August 2004 to July 2010, and UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights from 2014-2020.
Go to Profile#56
Reinhold Zippelius
#2995
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Reinhold Zippelius is a German jurist and law scholar. Now retired, he was formerly the professor of the Philosophy of law and Public law at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Life and career Reinhold Walter Zippelius was born in Ansbach , the son of Hans Zippelius and Marie Zippelius. He embarked on his study of jurisprudence in 1947 at Würzburg and then at Erlangen. In 1949 he switched to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where between 1949 and 1961 he was supported by a scholarship-bursary. He received his doctorate in 1953. His habilitation , also from Munich, and supervi...
Go to Profile#57
Douglas H. Ginsburg
#4135
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Douglas Howard Ginsburg is an American lawyer, jurist, and academic who serves as a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was appointed to that court in October 1986 by President Ronald Reagan, and served as its chief judge from 2001 until 2008. In October 1987, Reagan announced his intention to nominate Ginsburg as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. But Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration before being formally nominated, after news reports that he had smoked marijuana in the past created controversy.
Go to Profile#58
Claus Roxin
#10446
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Claus Roxin is a German jurist. He is one of the most influential dogmatists of German penal law and has gained national and international reputation in this field. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate by 28 universities around the world as well as the Bundesverdienstkreuz first class.
Go to Profile#59
Jed Rubenfeld
#5093
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
#60
Derrick Bell
#3837
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist. Bell worked for first the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
Go to Profile#61
Yochai Benkler
#1513
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#62
Mohammed VI of Morocco
#260
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Mohammed VI is King of Morocco. A member of the 'Alawi dynasty, he acceded to the throne on 23 July 1999, upon the death of his father, King Hassan II. Mohammed has vast business holdings across several economic sectors in Morocco. His net worth has been estimated at between and over US$8.2 billion. In 2015, Forbes named him the richest king in Africa and the fifth wealthiest monarch in the world.
Go to Profile#63
Robert C. Clark
#6555
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Robert C. Clark is Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and the Austin Wakeman Scott Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School. He previously served as dean and professor of law at Harvard Law School from 1989 to 2003. Clark is recognized as a leading authority in corporate law and corporate governance.
Go to Profile#64
Mohamed ElBaradei
#907
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Mohamed Mostafa ElBaradei is an Egyptian law scholar and diplomat who served as the vice president of Egypt on an interim basis from 14 July 2013 until his resignation on 14 August 2013. He was the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency , an intergovernmental organization under the auspices of the United Nations , from 1997 to 2009. At the end of his tenure he was appointed “Director General Emeritus of the International Atomic Energy Agency”. He and the IAEA were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 "for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for...
Go to Profile#65
S. F. C. Milsom
#9382
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Stroud Francis Charles Milsom was an English legal historian, best known for his challenge to aspects of the works of F. W. Maitland. He was Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge from 1976 to 1990 and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge from 1976 until his death. He was President of the Selden Society from 1985 to 1988.
Go to Profile#66
Jack Balkin
#3577
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jack M. Balkin is an American legal scholar. He is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Balkin is the founder and director of the Yale Information Society Project , a research center whose mission is "to study the implications of the Internet, telecommunications, and the new information technologies for law and society." He also directs the Knight Law and Media Program and the Abrams Institute for Free Expression at Yale Law School.
Go to Profile#67
Fausto Pocar
#7677
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Fausto Pocar is an Italian jurist. He is professor emeritus of International Law at the University of Milan, where he also taught Private International Law and European Law, and where he served many years as Faculty Dean and Vice-Rector. From 1984-2000, he was an elected member of the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations, serving as the committee's chair from 1991-92.
Go to Profile#68
Christine Lagarde
#332
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christine Madeleine Odette Lagarde is a French politician and lawyer who has served as President of the European Central Bank since 2019. She previously served as the 11th Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2011 to 2019. Lagarde had also served in the Government of France, most prominently as Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry from 2007 until 2011. She is the first woman to hold each of those posts.
Go to Profile#69
Brian Leiter
#2833
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#70
Hillary Clinton
#494
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is an American politician and diplomat who served as the 67th United States secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a U.S. senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and as the first lady of the U.S. to president Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, becoming the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major U.S. political party.
Go to Profile#71
Roger Cotterrell
#2825
Overall Influence
Roger B. M. Cotterrell is the Anniversary Professor of Legal Theory at Queen Mary University of London and was made a fellow of the British Academy in 2005. Previously he was the Acting Head of the Department of Law , Head of the Department of Law , Professor of Legal Theory and the Dean of the Faculty of Laws at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.
Go to Profile#72
Jean Carbonnier
#5863
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Jean Carbonnier was one of the most important French jurists of the 20th century. He was a civil law specialist and a private law professor. Life and career Jean Carbonnier was the son of Fernand Carbonnier and Dany Daniel. He married Madeleine Hugues.
Go to Profile#73
John Hart Ely
#6345
Overall Influence
1938 - 2003 (65 years)
John Hart Ely was an American legal scholar. He was a professor of law at Yale Law School from 1968 to 1973, Harvard Law School from 1973 to 1982, Stanford Law School from 1982 to 1996, and at the University of Miami Law School from 1996 until his death. From 1982 until 1987, he was the 9th dean of Stanford Law School.
Go to Profile#74
Jerome A. Cohen
#7089
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Jerome Alan Cohen is a professor of law at New York University School of Law, an expert in Chinese law, a adjunct senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves as "of counsel" at the international law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.
Go to Profile#75
Geoffrey R. Stone
#5500
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Geoffrey R. Stone is an American law professor and noted First Amendment scholar. He is currently the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Biography Stone completed a B.S. degree in 1968 at the University of Pennsylvania, and a J.D. degree in 1971 at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review. He clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1971–72, and then for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United Sta...
Go to Profile#76
John Ehrlichman
#889
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
John Daniel Ehrlichman was an American political aide who served as White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon. Ehrlichman was an important influence on Nixon's domestic policy, coaching him on issues and enlisting his support for environmental initiatives.
Go to Profile#77
Michael Kirby
#2655
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael Donald Kirby is an Australian jurist and academic who is a former Justice of the High Court of Australia, serving from 1996 to 2009. He has remained active in retirement; in May 2013 he was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to lead an inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea, which reported in February 2014.
Go to Profile#78
Susan N. Herman
#7715
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Susan N. Herman is an American legal scholar who served as president of the American Civil Liberties Union from October 2008 to January 2021. Herman has taught at Brooklyn Law School since 1980. Early life and education Herman was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island. Herman earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Barnard College in 1968 and a Juris Doctor from the New York University School of Law, where she was a note and comment editor for the New York University Law Review.
Go to Profile#79
David D. Cole
#5441
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#80
Stephan Kinsella
#4525
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Norman Stephan Kinsella is an American intellectual property lawyer, author, and deontological anarcho-capitalist. His legal works have been published by Oxford University Press, Oceana Publications, Mises Institute, Quid Pro Books and others.
Go to Profile#81
Mohammad Javad Zarif
#1261
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mohammad Javad Zarif Khansari is an Iranian career diplomat and academic. He was the foreign minister of Iran from 2013 until 2021 in the government of Hassan Rouhani. During his tenure as foreign minister, he led the Iranian negotiation with P5+1 countries which produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on 14 July 2015, lifting the economic sanctions against Iran on 16 January 2016. On 25 February 2019, Zarif resigned from his post as foreign minister. His resignation was rejected by Ali Khamenei and he continued as foreign minister.
Go to Profile#82
H. Patrick Glenn
#9598
Overall Influence
1940 - 2014 (74 years)
H. Patrick Glenn was the Peter M. Laing Professor at the Faculty of Law at McGill University. He specialized in comparative law, private international law, and civil procedure. Biography Glenn was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1940. He studied law at Queen's University and Harvard Law School and earned his doctorate in law at Strasbourg.
Go to Profile#83
Dick DeGuerin
#2030
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dick DeGuerin is an American criminal defense attorney based in Houston, most notable for defending Tom DeLay, Allen Stanford, David Koresh and Robert Durst. In 1994, DeGuerin was named Outstanding Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year by the State Bar of Texas Criminal Justice Section.
Go to Profile#84
Maryanne Trump Barry
#1465
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Maryanne Trump Barry was an American attorney and United States federal judge. She became an assistant United States attorney in 1974 and was first appointed to the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. In 1999, she was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Bill Clinton.
Go to Profile#85
Mark Kelman
#8338
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Mark Kelman is jurist and vice dean of Stanford Law School. As a prominent legal scholar, he has applied social science methodologies, including economics and psychology, to the study of law. He is one of the most cited law professors. He is regarded as one of the co-founders of the critical legal studies movement and authored "A Guide to Critical Legal Studies." He is widely known for his influential 1978 critique of the Coase theorem, a core part of law and economics.
Go to Profile#86
Eugene Volokh
#3695
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Eugene Volokh is an American legal scholar known for his scholarship in American constitutional law and libertarianism as well as his prominent legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. Volokh is regarded as an expert on the First Amendment. He is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is an affiliate at the law firm Schaerr Jaffe.
Go to Profile#87
Jean Charest
#574
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
John James "Jean" Charest is a Canadian lawyer and former politician who served as the 29th premier of Quebec from 2003 to 2012 and the fifth deputy prime minister of Canada in 1993. Charest was elected to the House of Commons in 1984 and would serve in several federal cabinet positions between 1986 and 1993. He became the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1993 and remained in the role until he entered provincial politics in 1998. Charest was elected as the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, and his party went on to form government in 2003.
Go to Profile#88
Amy Chua
#4372
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
#89
Geraldo Rivera
#591
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Geraldo Rivera is an American journalist, attorney, author, and political commentator who worked at the Fox News Channel from 2001 to 2023. He hosted the tabloid talk show Geraldo from 1987 to 1998. He gained publicity with the live 1986 TV special The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults. Rivera hosted the news magazine program Geraldo at Large, hosts the occasional broadcast of Geraldo Rivera Reports . He served as a rotating co-host of The Five from 2022 to 2023.
Go to Profile#90
Bruce Ackerman
#4852
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Bruce Arnold Ackerman is an American legal scholar who serves as a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. Ackerman was also among the unranked bottom 40 in the 2020 Prospect list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.
Go to Profile#91
Rod Rosenstein
#1705
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Rod Jay Rosenstein is an American attorney who served as the 37th United States deputy attorney general from April 2017 until May 2019. Prior to his appointment, he served as a United States attorney for the District of Maryland. At the time of his confirmation as deputy attorney general in April 2017, he was the longest-serving U.S. attorney. Rosenstein had also been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 2007, but his nomination was never considered by the U.S. Senate.
Go to Profile#92
Lawrence Summers
#137
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Lawrence Henry Summers is an American economist who served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, where he is the Charles W. Eliot university professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. In November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI.
Go to Profile#93
Telford Taylor
#2600
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Telford Taylor was an American lawyer and professor. Taylor was known for his role as lead counsel in the prosecution of war criminals after World War II, his opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s, and his outspoken criticism of American actions during the Vietnam War.
Go to Profile#94
Hans-Jürgen Papier
#11606
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Hans-Jürgen Papier is a German scholar of constitutional law who served as president of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany from 2002 to 2010. Early life and education Three years after graduating from law school in 1967 with the first law state examination, Papier completed his Ph.D. studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 1971 he received the second law state examination. In 1973 he received his Habilitation on the basis of a second dissertation on questions concerning German constitutional law.
Go to Profile#95
Navi Pillay
#915
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Navanethem "Navi" Pillay is a South African jurist who served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. A South African of Indian Tamil origin, she was the first non-white woman judge of the High Court of South Africa, and she has also served as a judge of the International Criminal Court and President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Her four-year term as High Commissioner for Human Rights began on 1 September 2008 and was extended an additional two years in 2012. She was succeeded in September 2014 by Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad. In April 2015 Pillay became the 16th Commissioner of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty.
Go to Profile#96
Prosper Weil
#10789
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Prosper Weil , was a French lawyer, professor emeritus of Panthéon-Assas University's law school and, since 1999, a member of the Institut de France's Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Life Weil was born in Strasbourg. His doctoral thesis, titled Les conséquences de l’annulation d’un acte administratif pour excès de pouvoir, earned him the prix de thèse de la Faculté de droit de Paris.
Go to Profile#97
Joseph H. H. Weiler
#8403
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Joseph Halevi Horowitz Weiler is an American academic, currently serving as European Union Jean Monnet Chair at New York University School of Law and Senior Fellow of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard.
Go to Profile#98
Barry Scheck
#3676
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Barry Charles Scheck is an American attorney and legal scholar. He received national media attention while serving on O. J. Simpson's defense team, collectively dubbed the "Dream Team", helping to win an acquittal in the highly publicized murder case. Scheck is the director of the Innocence Project and a professor at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
Go to Profile#99
Stephen M. Schwebel
#8510
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Stephen Myron Schwebel , is an American jurist and international judge, counsel and arbitrator. He previously served as judge of the World Bank Administrative Tribunal , as a member of the U.S. National Group at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, as president of the International Monetary Fund Administrative Tribunal , as president of the International Court of Justice , as vice president of the International Court of Justice , and as Judge of the International Court of Justice . Prior to his tenure on the ICJ, Schwebel served as deputy legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State and as assistant legal adviser to the U.S.
Go to Profile#100
Martha Minow
#5699
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
