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,
#651
Whitney Robson Harris
#32747
Overall Influence
1912 - 2010 (98 years)
Whitney Robson Harris was an American attorney, and one of the last surviving prosecutors from the Nuremberg Trials. Early life and education Harris was born in Seattle, Washington. His father was a car dealer. He attended the University of Washington and earned a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He later became a lawyer in the Navy at the rank of captain.
Go to Profile#652
Anthony Clark Arend
#23710
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Anthony Clark Arend is an American academic on international laws and politics. He is currently the Professor of Government and Foreign Service and has been Chair of the Department of Government at Georgetown University since June 2020.
Go to Profile#653
Mary L. Dudziak
#23214
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mary Louise Dudziak , is an American legal theorist, civil rights historian, educator, and a leading foreign policy and international relations expert. She is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University.
Go to Profile#654
F. Whitten Peters
#30653
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Frederick Whitten Peters is a District of Columbia lawyer and senior level public official. His law practice specializes in civil and criminal litigation including contract fraud, antitrust, tax and security cases. He has served in several key positions within the U.S. federal government, including as Secretary of the Air Force.
Go to Profile#655
William Kovacic
#21335
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
William Evan Kovacic is an American legal scholar who served as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission from 2006 to 2011, including as its chairman from 2008 to 2009. He is a member of the Republican Party.
Go to Profile#656
Michael I. Krauss
#30073
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Ian Krauss is a professor emeritus of law at Antonin Scalia Law School , specializing in tort law, products liability, jurisprudence and legal ethics. He writes a Torts and Legal Ethics column for Forbes.
Go to Profile#657
William Van Alstyne
#36472
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
William Warner Van Alstyne was an American attorney, law professor, and constitutional law scholar. Prior to retiring in 2012, he held the named position of Lee Professor of Law at William and Mary Law School. He was the Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School for more than 30 years. Among many others, he taught at Chicago Law School, Stanford Law School, University of California, Berkeley Law School, University of California, Los Angeles Law School, and Michigan Law School.
Go to Profile#658
Allan Ides
#43447
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Allan Ides is an American lawyer, the Christopher N. May Professor in the Loyola Law School of Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California and was a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, Gould School of Law, for Fall 2011. From 1989 through 1997, Ides was a faculty member at Washington and Lee University School of Law.
Go to Profile#659
Susan Rose-Ackerman
#16386
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Susan Rose-Ackerman is Henry R. Luce Professor Emeritus of Law and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University. She is an expert in political corruption and development, administrative law, law and regulatory policy, the nonprofit sector, and federalism.
Go to Profile#660
Michael Bothe
#51755
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michael Bothe is a German legal scholar. The focus of his work is international law, in particular peacekeeping law, arms control, humanitarian law, international environmental law and comparative constitutional law.
Go to Profile#661
Dean Spielmann
#25002
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Dean Spielmann is a Luxembourgish lawyer and a former president of the European Court of Human Rights. He has been a judge of the European Court of Human Rights in respect of Luxembourg since 2004, president of the Fifth Section of the Court since 2011 and was elected vice-president and then, shortly afterwards, president in 2012. He is also a member of the Grand Ducal Institute of Luxembourg and has held academic posts at the universities of Luxembourg, Nancy and Louvain.
Go to Profile#662
Larry Klayman
#8065
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Larry Elliot Klayman is an American attorney, right-wing activist, and former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor. He founded both Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch. In addition to his numerous lawsuits against the Clinton administration, which led him to be called a "Clinton nemesis," Klayman has filed a number of lawsuits against political figures and governmental agencies. Klayman's goal in initiating the lawsuits is often to obtain information through the discovery process, rather than to win the lawsuit. Most cases brought by either Judicial Watch or Klayman himself have failed.
Go to Profile#663
Ruth Wedgwood
#19682
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ruth Wedgwood is an American legal scholar who holds the Edward B. Burling Chair in International Law and Diplomacy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#664
Jennifer Granick
#23351
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jennifer Stisa Granick is an American attorney and educator. Senator Ron Wyden has called Granick an "NBA all-star of surveillance law." She is well known for her work with intellectual property law, free speech, privacy law, and other things relating to computer security, and has represented several high-profile hackers.
Go to Profile#665
Raymond Lohier
#31042
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Raymond Joseph Lohier Jr. is a Canadian-born American lawyer who serves as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Formerly, he was an assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a senior trial attorney in the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. He was the chief of the securities and commodities fraud task force in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's office. He was recommended by New York Senator Charles Schumer for nomination to the seat on the Second Circuit that was vacated by Judge Sonia Sotomayor when she was elevated to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Go to Profile#666
Peter Drahos
#23468
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Professor Peter Drahos is an Australian academic and researcher specializing in the areas of intellectual property and global business regulation amongst others. He is the Director of the Centre for Governance of Knowledge and Development and was formerly the Head of Program of the Regulatory Institutions Network at the Australian National University. He has served in an advisory capacity to various governments and international organisations on intellectual property issues and holds a Chair in Intellectual Property at the University of London. He is also a member of the Australian Bar. He was...
Go to Profile#667
Paul F. van der Heijden
#35156
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Paul F. van der Heijden is professor of international labour law at Leiden University, the Netherlands. From February 2007 up to 2013 he was rector magnificus and president of the same university. Van der Heijden is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2003.
Go to Profile#668
Louis B. Sohn
#28982
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
Louis Bruno Sohn was an Austrian–American legal scholar. Biography Sohn was born in Lemberg, in what was then Austria-Hungary, later Poland and now Ukraine. He earned his first law degree at John Casimir University in Lwow in 1939, leaving for the United States to take up a Harvard University research fellowship two weeks before Nazi Germany invaded Poland. He was a longtime scholar of international law and advocate of international institutions.
Go to Profile#669
Richard H. Fallon Jr.
#29694
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Richard Henry Fallon Jr. is an American legal scholar and the Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Early life and education Fallon was born in Augusta, Maine, on 4 January 1952, and attended Yale College, graduating in 1975 with a bachelor of arts degree. He then accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1977. Fallon returned to the United States and earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1980. Fallon subsequently served as a law clerk for J. Skelly Wright and Lewis F.
Go to Profile#670
Shamnad Basheer
#26587
Overall Influence
1976 - 2019 (43 years)
Shamnad Basheer was an Indian legal scholar and founder of the blog SpicyIP. He was also the founder of IDIA, a trust which works on making legal education accessible for underprivileged students. Basheer was a Ministry of Human Resource Development Chaired Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the WBNUJS, Kolkata, and the Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George Washington University Law School, and a research associate at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Center . He founded several initiatives such as SpicyIP, IDIA, P-PIL and Lex Biosis.
Go to Profile#671
David Nimmer
#29854
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Nimmer is an American lawyer, law professor, renowned as an expert in United States copyright law. He received an A.B. with distinction and honors in 1977 from Stanford University and his J.D. in 1980 from Yale Law School, where he served as editor of the Yale Law Journal. David Nimmer is of counsel to Irell & Manella LLP in Los Angeles, California. He also serves as a Professor from Practice at University of California, Los Angeles Law School and Distinguished Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. In 2000, he was elected to the American Law Institute. He has served as a...
Go to Profile#672
Allan Rosas
#34594
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Allan Viktor Johnsson Rosas is a Finnish jurist who served as a judge of the European Court of Justice from 2002 until 2019. Career Rosas is Doctor of Laws of the University of Turku ; and he was professor of Law at the University of Turku and at the Åbo Akademi University in Turku , also Director of the latter's Institute for Human Rights . He has held various international and national academic positions of responsibility and memberships of learned societies, and coordinated several international and national research projects and programmes, including in the fields of EU law, internation...
Go to Profile#673
Joaquin Bernas
#23822
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Joaquin G. Bernas SJ was a Jesuit priest, lawyer, college professor and writer who was Dean Emeritus of the Ateneo de Manila Law School in Makati, Philippines. He was a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission which drafted the 1987 Philippine Constitution.
Go to Profile#674
David G. Epstein
#32257
Overall Influence
David Gustav Epstein is the George E. Allen Professor of Law at University of Richmond School of Law and an expert on bankruptcy. Epstein was raised in Texas by a Jewish family. Epstein received a B.A. from the University of Texas in 1964, a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law in 1966, and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 1969. While a student at UT, he became a member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. He was also a clerk for the Texas Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#675
Gabriel J. Chin
#27885
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Gabriel Jack Chin is an author, legal scholar, and Professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law. He teaches a variety of courses, including Criminal Law, Immigration, Criminal Appellate Advocacy, and Race and Law.
Go to Profile#676
Paolo Boffetta
#37623
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Paolo Boffetta is an Italian epidemiologist. He is doing research on cancer and other chronic diseases, where he contributed to the understanding of the role of occupation, environment, alcohol, smoking and nutrition in disease development.
Go to Profile#677
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin
#18989
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is an Irish academic lawyer specialising in human rights law. She is the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism for the United Nations Human Rights Council since August 1, 2017.
Go to Profile#678
Zelman Cowen
#11577
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Sir Zelman Cowen, was an Australian legal scholar and university administrator who served as the 19th Governor-General of Australia, in office from 1977 to 1982. Cowen was born in Melbourne, and attended Scotch College before going on to the University of Melbourne. His studies were interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the Royal Australian Navy. After the war's end, Cowen attended New College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship. He subsequently won the prestigious Vinerian Scholarship as the best student in the Bachelor of Civil Law degree. He remained at Oxford after graduati...
Go to Profile#679
Ramsey Clark
#10811
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
William Ramsey Clark was an American lawyer, activist, and federal government official. A progressive, New Frontier liberal, he occupied senior positions in the United States Department of Justice under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, serving as United States Attorney General from 1967 to 1969; previously, he was Deputy Attorney General from 1965 to 1967 and Assistant Attorney General from 1961 to 1965.
Go to Profile#680
Fernando de la Rúa
#9839
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Fernando de la Rúa was an Argentine politician and a member of the Radical Civic Union political party who served as President of Argentina from 10 December 1999 to 21 December 2001. De la Rúa was born in Córdoba; he entered politics after graduating with a degree in law. He was elected senator in 1973 and unsuccessfully ran for the office of Vice President as Ricardo Balbín's running mate the same year. He was re-elected senator in 1983 and 1993, and as deputy in 1991. He unsuccessfully opposed the pact of Olivos between President Carlos Menem and party leader Raúl Alfonsín, which enabled t...
Go to Profile#681
Josh Blackman
#47934
Overall Influence
Joshua Michael Blackman is an American lawyer who is employed as an associate professor of law at the South Texas College of Law where he focuses on constitutional law and the intersection of law and technology. He has authored three books.
Go to Profile#682
Mark Pieth
#28892
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mark Pieth is Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Basel, Switzerland and a prominent anti-corruption expert. Pieth's career as a legal expert, defence lawyer, judge and compliance advisor includes several roles on the international stage, such as a member of the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering, Chair of a United Nations Intergovernmental Expert Group on illicit drug trafficking and 24 years as Chair of the OECD Working Group on Bribery, which monitors the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.
Go to Profile#683
Paul-André Crépeau
#35523
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Paul-André Crépeau, was a Canadian legal academic who led the reforms of the Civil Code of Quebec and the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. Born in Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan, he studied philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He received his legal education from the Université de Montréal. He attended University College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1950. In 1955 he received a Doctor of Law from the University of Paris. From 1974 to 1984, he was the director of the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University. In 1975, he founded the Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law, and served as its Director until 1996.
Go to Profile#684
Oona A. Hathaway
#33662
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Oona Anne Hathaway is an American professor and lawyer. She is the founder and director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School. She is also a professor of international and area studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a faculty member at the Jackson School of Global Affairs.
Go to Profile#685
Victoria F. Nourse
#38288
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Victoria Frances Nourse is a Ralph V. Whitworth Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and the executive director of the Center on Congressional Studies at Georgetown Law. A nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, pursuant to the rules of the Senate, her nomination was returned to the president on December 17, 2011, after the Senate adjourned for more than 30 days. Her nomination was not resubmitted by the president. From 2014 to 2015, she served as counsel to Vice President Joe Biden.
Go to Profile#686
Baltasar Garzón
#16429
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Baltasar Garzón Real is a former Spanish judge. Garzón formerly served on Spain's central criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, and was the examining magistrate of the Juzgado Central de Instrucción No. 5, which investigates the most important criminal cases in Spain, including terrorism, organised crime, and money laundering. In 2011, he was suspended from judicial activity and in 2012 he was convicted of illegal wiretapping and disbarred for a period of 11 years. During this time, Garzón legally assisted Julian Assange. On 24 March 2020, it was announced that Garzón was diagnosed with COV...
Go to Profile#687
Nicolas Bratza
#12599
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sir Nicolas Dušan Bratza is a British lawyer and a former President of the European Court of Human Rights. Bratza was the Judge of the Court in respect of the United Kingdom, the second person to hold the post as a full-time appointment since Protocol 11 to the European Convention on Human Rights established the Court as a permanent body. His term ended on 31 October 2012. He was appointed as a board member of the International Service for Human Rights in May 2013.
Go to Profile#688
Bridget Mary McCormack
#30773
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Bridget Mary McCormack is an American lawyer, professor, and retired justice. She served on the Michigan Supreme Court from 2013 to 2022, first as an associate justice, and as chief justice from 2019 to 2022. Previously she was a professor at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, where she taught criminal law and legal ethics and oversaw the law school's clinical programs as associate dean of clinical affairs. Her academic work focused on practical experience in legal education. McCormack launched and worked in a pediatric advocacy law clinic focusing on children with health problems, and a domestic violence clinic.
Go to Profile#689
Eivind Smith
#50611
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Eivind Smith is a Norwegian jurist and professor of law. He was born in Bærum, and took the dr.juris degree in 1979. Since 1986, he has been Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Go to Profile#690
Jan Klabbers
#29882
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Johannes Antonius Maria "Jan" Klabbers is a Dutch Academy Professor at the University of Helsinki, on leave from his regular position as Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki. He was Director of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research, based at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Law, and deputy director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. He has previously held several positions at the University of Amsterdam, where he also completed his doctoral degree.
Go to Profile#691
Ejan Mackaay
#20148
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ejan Mackaay is a Canadian emeritus professor of law and author. He was a professor of law at the Université de Montréal between 1972 and 2009. Career Ejan Mackaay was born in Amsterdam. He obtained an LL.M from the University of Amsterdam in 1966 and an LL.M from the University of Toronto in 1977, with Michael Trebilcock as thesis adviser. He obtained his LL.D. at the University of Amsterdam in 1980 codirected by Arnold Heertje and Hans Franken on a thesis titled: "Economics of information and law". Mackaay became professor of law at the Université de Montréal in 1972. He retired in 2009.
Go to Profile#692
Gerald Frug
#36070
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Gerald E. Frug was an American legal scholar. He was the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law emeritus at Harvard Law School, and a leading academic authority on local government law. He was married to feminist law professor Mary Joe Frug, who was murdered in 1991.
Go to Profile#693
Benedict Kingsbury
#34388
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Benedict William Kingsbury is Vice Dean and Director of the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York University and a leading scholar in international law and diplomacy. He was recently also announced as a faculty director for the new NYU Law Guarini Institute for Global Legal Studies. Born in Holland and raised in Hamilton, New Zealand he was a Rhodes Scholar in 1982, a commercial law graduate from Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand and a doctor of International Relations and Law at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He lectured at Oxford University and Duke University prior to his New York University Law School appointment.
Go to Profile#694
L. Song Richardson
#30031
Overall Influence
Leah Song Richardson is an American lawyer, legal scholar, and higher education administrator who is currently president of Colorado College. She was previously dean and a chancellor's professor of law of the University of California, Irvine School of Law.
Go to Profile#695
James E. Ryan
#21945
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
James Edward Ryan is an American legal scholar and lawyer, currently serving as the ninth president of the University of Virginia since August 2018. He previously served as the eleventh dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 2013 to 2018.
Go to Profile#696
Hashem El-Serag
#35278
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Hashem B. El-Serag is a Palestinian-American physician and medical researcher best known for his research in liver cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma and the hepatitis C virus. He serves as the Margaret M. and Albert B. Alkek Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine as well as the Director of the Texas Medical Center Digestive Disease Center. El-Serag previously served as president of the American Gastroenterological Association and Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
Go to Profile#697
Henry B. Hansmann
#38836
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Henry B. Hansmann is an American scholar of law and economics; he is the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School. Hansmann is noted for his scholarship on the economics of organizational ownership and design and is credited with founding the modern study of nonprofit organizations. He is known for his 1980 article "The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise" which has had a "seminal influence on analyses of the law and economics of the nonprofit sector."
Go to Profile#698
Klaus Volk
#44641
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Klaus Volk is a German jurist, professor at University of Munich and defense lawyer specialized in commercial-law-related criminal cases. His doctorate thesis at University of Munich 1970 was about philosophy of law.
Go to Profile#699
Stephen B. Baylin
#46695
Overall Influence
Stephen Bruce Baylin is the deputy director and associate director for research at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research and medicine and chief of cancer biology of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research focus is epigenetics in the development of cancer, and he was one of the first researchers in this field in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#700
Yvonne Mokgoro
#18583
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Yvonne Mokgoro GOB is a former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Career Mokgoro was appointed to the bench in 1994 by Nelson Mandela. Mokgoro is a board member of the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria and is the current Chairperson of the South African Law Reform Commission.
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