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,
#551
Hilary Charlesworth
#17168
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Hilary Christiane Mary Charlesworth is an Australian international lawyer. She has been a Judge of the International Court of Justice since 5 November 2021, and is Harrison Moore Professor of Law and Melbourne Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, and Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University.
Go to Profile#552
James R. Hines Jr.
#6894
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
James R. Hines Jr. is an American economist and a founder of academic research into corporate-focused tax havens, and the effect of U.S. corporate tax policy on the behaviors of U.S. multinationals. His papers were some of the first to analyse profit shifting, and to establish quantitative features of tax havens. Hines showed that being a tax haven could be a prosperous strategy for a jurisdiction, and controversially, that tax havens can promote economic growth. Hines showed that use of tax havens by U.S. multinationals had maximized long-term U.S. exchequer tax receipts, at the expense of other jurisdictions.
Go to Profile#553
Bernd Schünemann
#48028
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bernd Schünemann is a German jurist and legal philosopher. A student of Claus Roxin, he earned his doctorate and habilitation in penal law in 1971 and 1975 respectively. Schünemann is a prolific legal scholar and served as a consultant for the Bundestag and other organizations. His work is especially known in Latin America and East Asia and he earned six honorary doctorates from universities around the world.
Go to Profile#554
Jon Bing
#13300
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Jon Bing was a Norwegian writer and law professor at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law , and the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo. Bing was considered a pioneer in international IT and information law. He held honorary doctorates from the University of Stockholm and the University of Copenhagen, and was a visiting professor at Kings College, University of London. Bing was part of The Protection of Privacy Committee. From 1979 to 1981 he was head of Norsk Filmråd. Between 1981 and 1982, he was the head of The Council of Europe Committee on Legal Data Processing. Betwe...
Go to Profile#555
Pierre de Vos
#22986
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Pierre Francois de Vos is a South African constitutional law scholar. Early life De Vos was born in Messina, Transvaal, and matriculated from Pietersburg High School in Pietersburg . His sister, Anne-Marie, is a well-known advocate.
Go to Profile#556
Malcolm Shaw
#21926
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Malcolm Nathan Shaw KC is a British legal academic, author, editor and lawyer. Early life Shaw studied at the University of Liverpool , the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Keele University . Career Shaw was the Sir Robert Jennings Professor of International Law at the University of Leicester and taught international law, human rights and equity and trusts. Following retirement, he was appointed as Senior Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge and made a Trustee of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. He is a practising...
Go to Profile#557
Jean Pradel
#38958
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Jean Pradel was a French jurist, magistrate, and professor. He specialized in criminal law. Biography Pradel studied at the Faculty of Law at the University of Poitiers from 1951 to 1957 and subsequently passed the entrance exam for the French National School for the Judiciary. He briefly served as a deputy judge at the of Brest before serving in the Algerian War from 1958 to 1960. In 1962, he became a Deputy and a military prosecutor in Nemours.
Go to Profile#558
Karel Vasak
#10850
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Karel Vasak or Karel Vašák was a Czech-French international official and university professor. Vasak was born in Czechoslovakia and later moved to France to study law. He decided to remain there after the Communist coup in Prague in February 1948. He acquired French citizenship and worked for the Council of Europe in several capacities.
Go to Profile#559
Alberto Alemanno
#11498
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Alberto Alemanno is an academic, author, public interest lawyer, and civic entrepreneur. He is Jean Monnet Professor in EU Law at HEC Paris since 2009, permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, School of Public Policy, and at the College of Europe in Bruges.
Go to Profile#560
Lis Wiehl
#13443
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lis Wiehl is a New York Times bestselling American author of fiction and nonfiction books, and a legal analyst. She is the author of twenty books, including, most recently, A Spy in Plain Sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen―America's Most Damaging Russian Spy, published by Pegasus Books.
Go to Profile#561
James Boyle
#25806
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
James Boyle is a Scottish intellectual property scholar. He is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina. He is most prominently known for advocating looser copyright policies in the United States and worldwide.
Go to Profile#562
Louis Blom-Cooper
#10527
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Sir Louis Jacques Blom-Cooper was an English author and lawyer specialising in public and administrative law. Early life Born in London, his parents were the grocer Alfred Blom-Cooper and Ellen Flesseman. Blom-Cooper and his family were Jewish. He did national service as a Captain in the East Yorkshire Regiment from 1944 to 1947. Louis Blom-Cooper was educated at Port Regis School, Seaford College, University of British Columbia, King's College London , the University of Amsterdam, and at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1952.
Go to Profile#563
Alfredo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena
#28841
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Alfredo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena is a Mexican lawyer who serves as a justice of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. Studies Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena earned his law degree at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his graduate degree, LL.M. and International Tax Certificate from Harvard University. As a graduate student, he was awarded a scholarship from the Fulbright-García Robles Foundation.
Go to Profile#564
Sean D. Murphy
#28682
Overall Influence
Sean David Murphy is an American international law scholar currently serving as the Manatt/Ahn Professor of International Law at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., where he has been teaching since 1998. His primary areas of scholarly research are public international law, foreign affairs and the Constitution of the United States, international organizations, international dispute settlement, and law of the sea. Murphy served for ten years on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and is a former president of the American Society of International Law.
Go to Profile#565
David Scheffer
#23349
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
David John Scheffer is an American lawyer and diplomat who served as the first United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, during President Bill Clinton's second term in office. He is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law, where he directed the Center for International Human Rights from 2006 to 2019.
Go to Profile#566
Ingeborg Schwenzer
#39884
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ingeborg Schwenzer is a German jurist and professor for private and comparative law at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Life and career Schwenzer studied law at the University of Freiburg i. Br. and the Université de Genève from 1970 to 1975. From 1973 to 1975 she worked as student assistant at the Institute for Administrative Law at the University of Freiburg i. Br. In 1975, Schwenzer passed the Erste juristische Staatsprüfung at the University of Freiburg. She ranked third amongst 209 candidates.
Go to Profile#567
Suzanne Côté
#22087
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Suzanne Côté is a puisne justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. She was nominated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to replace retiring justice Louis LeBel. Before her appointment to the Supreme Court, she was a partner at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP and previously Stikeman Elliott LLP in Montréal. She is the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court directly from private practice.
Go to Profile#568
Kenneth Abraham
#31211
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kenneth S. Abraham is the Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Biography In 1967, Abraham graduated with a bachelor's degree from Indiana University, magna cum laude, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Abraham then attended Yale Law School, where he studied under famed torts scholar and future judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Guido Calabresi, graduating with a J.D. in 1971.
Go to Profile#569
Howard Shelanski
#27364
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Howard Shelanski is an American attorney, economist, and legal scholar. He is a professor of law at Georgetown University, where he holds the Sheehy Chair in Antitrust Law and Trade Regulation, and a partner in the law firm of Davis, Polk & Wardwell. He served in the Obama administration as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs , part of the Office of Management and Budget.
Go to Profile#570
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#9105
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Go to Profile#571
James C. Hathaway
#36596
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
James Hathaway is a Canadian-American scholar of international refugee law and related aspects of human rights and public international law. His work has been frequently cited by the most senior courts of the common law world, and has played a pivotal role in the evolution of refugee studies scholarship. Hathaway pioneered the understanding of refugee status as surrogate or substitute protection of human rights, authored the world's first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees, merging doctrinal study of refugee and human rights law with empirical analysis of the state of refu...
Go to Profile#572
Philip Heymann
#12695
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Philip Benjamin Heymann was an American legal scholar and federal prosecutor who headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General during the Carter administration and was briefly Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration before he resigned over management and policy differences as well as perceived interference by the White House. He was involved internationally in supporting the rule of law in criminal justice systems. In domestic politics he was a vocal supporter of civil and political liberties and, as such, was actively critical of the George W.
Go to Profile#573
Elizabeth Warren
#5919
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Elizabeth Ann Warren is an American politician and former law professor who is the senior United States senator from Massachusetts, serving since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party and regarded as a progressive, Warren has focused on consumer protection, equitable economic opportunity, and the social safety net while in the Senate. Warren was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, ultimately finishing third.
Go to Profile#574
Robert Pitofsky
#19942
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Robert Pitofsky was an American lawyer and politician who was the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission of the United States from April 11, 1995, to May 31, 2001. He had previously been Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center from 1983 to 1989, and was Dean Emeritus at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#575
Peter Gabel
#21316
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Peter Gabel was an American law academic and associate editor of Tikkun, a bi-monthly Jewish critique of politics, culture, and society, He wrote a number of articles for the magazine on subjects ranging from the original intent of the framers of the Constitution to the creationism/evolution controversy .
Go to Profile#576
Lech Garlicki
#35742
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Lech Garlicki is a Polish jurist and constitutional law specialist. Since 1988 he has been a professor at the Warsaw University, in the years 1993–2001 judge of the Constitutional Tribunal of the Republic of Poland and in the years 2001–2002 president of the Polish Society of Constitutional Law. Since 2002 he has been a judge of European Court of Human Rights.
Go to Profile#577
Georg Nolte
#26016
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Georg Nolte is a German jurist and Judge of the International Court of Justice. He is professor of public international law at the Humboldt University of Berlin and has been a member of the UN's International Law Commission from 2007 to 2021, serving as its chairman in 2017. In November 2020 he was elected Judge of the International Court of Justice by the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council, and he took office on 6 February 2021.
Go to Profile#578
Arvid Pardo
#30799
Overall Influence
1914 - 1999 (85 years)
Arvid Pardo was a Maltese and Swedish diplomat of Jewish origin, scholar and university professor. He is known as the Father of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea". Pardo was born in Rome. His father, Guido Pardo, was born in Malta in 1874 to Enrico Pardo of Sephardic Jewish origin from Livorno. Guido Pardo worked for the International Labour Organization and died of typhus while on a relief mission in the Soviet Union in 1922. His Swedish mother died a year later during an appendectomy and his brother was killed in an automobile accident. He became the ward of a friend ...
Go to Profile#579
Yoram Rabin
#29010
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Yoram Rabin is an Israeli law scholar. He is the president of the College of Management in Israel, the country's first and largest private college. In October 2015 Rabin was appointed legal adviser of the Israeli State Comptroller. Rabin has written and edited several books on public law, human rights and criminal law. He is one of the founding members of the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel. In 2003/4, he was a member of the National Committee for Reform of Education .
Go to Profile#580
Paul A. Freund
#24457
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Paul Abraham Freund was an American legal scholar. He taught most of his life at Harvard Law School and is known for his writings on the United States Constitution and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Go to Profile#581
Lawrence Douglas
#10033
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Lawrence R. Douglas is an American legal scholar, currently holding the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is also an author of both fiction and nonfiction.
Go to Profile#582
George V. Higgins
#13559
Overall Influence
1939 - 1999 (60 years)
George V. Higgins was an American author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, raconteur and college professor. He authored more than thirty books, including Bomber's Law, Trust, and Kennedy for the Defense, and is best known for his bestselling crime novels, including The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which established the Boston noir genre of gangster tales that spawned several popular films by followers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Go to Profile#583
Robert F. Orr
#40032
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert F. "Bob" Orr is an American attorney, jurist, and politician who served as an associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1995 to 2004. Orr was a Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina in 2008 North Carolina gubernatorial election.
Go to Profile#584
Robert Ray
#15798
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Robert William Ray is an American lawyer. As the successor to Ken Starr as the head of the Office of the Independent Counsel he investigated and issued the final reports on the Whitewater controversy, the White House travel office controversy, and the White House FBI files controversy. Before that he was Deputy Independent Counsel investigating former Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy and before that Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Go to Profile#585
Richard Primus
#33887
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Richard Abraham Primus is an American legal scholar. He currently teaches United States constitutional law at the University of Michigan Law School, where he is Theodore J. St. Antoine Collegiate Professor of Law. In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on the relationship between history and constitutional interpretation.
Go to Profile#586
Hans Zeisel
#8196
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
Hans Zeisel was an Austrian-American sociologist and legal scholar who taught at the University of Chicago Law School from 1953 to 1974. He was best known for using quantitative social science techniques to study the law.
Go to Profile#587
Eric Hargan
#19692
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Eric David Hargan is an American lawyer and government official who served as United States Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services from October 2017 to January 2021. A member of the Republican Party, Hargan previously acted in this role in 2007 under the George W. Bush administration.
Go to Profile#588
Trevor Allan
#33808
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Trevor Robert Seaward Allan, LLD is Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Law at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He is known for challenging constitutional orthodoxy in the United Kingdom, particularly in his redefinition of the scope of parliamentary sovereignty.
Go to Profile#589
George Bermann
#32318
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
George Bermann is an American lawyer and scholar of international law. He is the Walter Gelhorn Professor of Law, the Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Law, the Director of the Center for International Commercial and Investment Arbitration Law, and the Co-Director of the European Legal Studies Center at Columbia Law School, as well as a permanent faculty member of the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris, France, and the Collège d'Europe in Bruges, Belgium. Previously, he held the Tocqueville-Fulbright Distinguished Professorship at the University of Paris I .
Go to Profile#590
Werner Flume
#35103
Overall Influence
1908 - 2009 (101 years)
Werner Flume was a German jurist and professor of Roman law, private law, tax law and a legal historian. He has significantly influenced the modern development of German private law and has been called a "lawyer of the century" for his contributions.
Go to Profile#591
Norval Morris
#23674
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Norval Ramsden Morris was an Australian-educated United States law professor, criminologist, and advocate for criminal justice and mental health reform. He was formerly Dean of the University of Chicago Law School.
Go to Profile#592
Boris Bittker
#31594
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Boris Irving Bittker was an American legal scholar. A professor at Yale Law School, Bittker was a prolific author, writing many textbooks and over one hundred articles on tax law. Born in Rochester, New York, Bittker attended Cornell University and Yale Law School . After law school, Bittker clerkeded for Judge Jerome Frank of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From 1942 to 43 Bittker worked as an attorney for the Lend-Lease Administration in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#593
James Baker
#5502
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
James Addison Baker III is an American attorney, diplomat and statesman. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 10th White House Chief of Staff and 67th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan and the 61st U.S. Secretary of State before returning as the 16th White House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush.
Go to Profile#594
Naoyuki Agawa
#26482
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Naoyuki Agawa is a Japanese lawyer, diplomat, academic and author. He has been a professor of law at Keio University since 1999; and since 2009, he has served as the university's vice president for International Collaboration and Education.
Go to Profile#595
Thomas C. Grey
#32740
Overall Influence
Thomas C. Grey is the Nelson Bowman Sweitzer and Marie B. Sweitzer Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Stanford Law School. As a legal theorist and a historian of modern American legal thought, Grey has written widely on pragmatism, legal formalism, legal realism, and the jurisprudence of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Go to Profile#596
Jimly Asshiddiqie
#17095
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jimly Asshiddiqie is an Indonesian academic who served as the first chief justice of Indonesia's Constitutional Court from 2003 to 2008. Education and academic career Jimly graduated from high school in Palembang in 1973. He obtained his law degree from the University of Indonesia in 1982. In 1986, he obtained his master's in law from UI. In 1990, he obtained his doctorate in law from UI and the Van Vollenhoven Institute, as well as Leiden University Law Faculty. In 1998, Jimly became Professor of Constitutional Law at the UI Faculty of Law.
Go to Profile#597
Adam Winkler
#23782
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Adam Winkler is the Connell Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights and Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. His work has frequently been cited in judicial opinions, including in Supreme Court cases pertaining to the First and Second Amendments.
Go to Profile#598
Lucia Zedner
#12656
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lucia Zedner FBA is a British legal scholar. She is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Biography Zedner was born on 20 February 1961 in Kingston, Surrey, England. She studied at the University of York, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She studied for her doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford, between 1984 and 1989. Her doctoral thesis was titled "The criminality of women and its control in England 1850-1914".
Go to Profile#599
A.E. Dick Howard
#28771
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Arthur Ellsworth Dick Howard is a legal scholar who has devoted his professional life to understanding the Supreme Court, the American Constitution, and constitutions of the world. He is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Washingtonian magazine has named Professor Howard one of the most respected educators in the nation, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Library of Virginia included Professor Howard on their list of the "greatest Virginians" of the 20th century. In 2013, the University of Virginia recognized Howard with its Thomas...
Go to Profile#600
Xu Zhiyong
#9331
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Xu Zhiyong is a Chinese civil rights activist and formerly a lecturer at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. He was one of the founders of the NGO Open Constitution Initiative and an active rights lawyer in China who campaigned against corruption and helped those underprivileged. He is the main founder and icon of the New Citizens' Movement in China. In January 2014 he was sentenced to four years in prison for "gathering crowds to disrupt public order". He was detained again on February 15, 2020, in the southern city of Guangzhou after two months in hiding, for his partici...
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