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,
#1101
Clèmerson Merlin Clève
#41720
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Clèmerson Merlin Clève is a Brazilian jurist, Law school professor, and lawyer. One of the most respected constitutionalists in Brazil, he is a full professor of constitutional law at the Federal University of Paraná . Clève is also a full professor of constitutional law and president at the Autonomous University Center of Brazil , and a visiting professor at Universidad Pablo de Olavide – Máster Universitario en Derechos Humanos, Interculturalidad y Desarrollo and Doctorado en Ciencias Jurídicas y Políticas . Clève also works as the institutional leader of the UFPR's 'Center of Constituti...
Go to Profile#1102
Richard H. Stern
#42432
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Richard Harvey Stern is an American attorney and law professor. Biography Born in New York City, Stern received an A.B. cum laude from Columbia College in 1953 and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Columbia University School of Engineering in 1954. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1956, and then returned to civilian life and earned an LL.B. at Yale Law School, studying under and acting as teaching assistant for Professor Friedrich Kessler and graduating cum laude and Order of the Coif, in 1959.
Go to Profile#1103
David Maxwell Walker
#38085
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
David Maxwell Walker was a Scottish lawyer, academic, and Regius Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow. Early life Walker was educated at the High School of Glasgow, at the time the city's publicly funded grammar school, where he was Mackindlay Prizeman in Classics. He was the son of a bank agent who died when Walker was 14.
Go to Profile#1104
Barry E. Friedman
#40070
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Barry E. Friedman is an American academic and one of the country's leading authorities on constitutional law, policing, criminal procedure, and federal courts, working at the intersections of law, politics and history. Friedman teaches a variety of courses including Judicial Decisionmaking, Federal Courts and the Federal System, and Criminal Procedure: Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as a seminar on Democratic Policing. He writes about judicial review, constitutional law and theory, federal jurisdiction, judicial behavior, and policing. His scholarship appears regularly in the nation's t...
Go to Profile#1105
Simon Chesterman
#34508
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Simon Chesterman is an Australian legal academic and writer who is currently vice-provost at the National University of Singapore and dean of the NUS's faculty of law and NUS College. He is also a senior director for AI governance at AI Singapore, editor of the Asian Journal of International Law and co-president of the Law Schools Global League.
Go to Profile#1106
Marco Rubio
#13109
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Marco Antonio Rubio is an American politician and lawyer serving as the senior United States senator from Florida, a seat he has held since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, he served as Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives from 2006 to 2008. Rubio unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for President of the United States in 2016, winning presidential primaries in Minnesota, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
Go to Profile#1107
Norman Spaulding
#50136
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Norman W. Spaulding III is a professor of federal civil procedure and professional ethics at Stanford Law School. Education Spaulding graduated from Williams College in 1993, where he majored in political science. A year later, Spaulding matriculated at Stanford Law, where he was active as a member of the Stanford Law Review and Stanford Environmental Law Journal, as well as the Black Law Students Association. After law school, Spaulding clerked for Northern District of California Judge Thelton Henderson and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Betty Fletcher.
Go to Profile#1108
Daniel R. Mandelker
#44274
Overall Influence
Daniel R. Mandelker is the Howard A. Stamper Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law. His scholarship has been heavily cited in the fields of land use law, state and local government law, and environmental law.
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Nigel Rodley
#36470
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Sir Nigel Simon Rodley KBE was an international lawyer and professor. Personal life Rodley was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 1 December 1941 to Hans Israel Rosenfeld and Rachel . His parents later changed their name to Rodley. His father, who served in the British Army under the name John Peter Rodley, was killed in action in the Netherlands in September 1944. He was educated at Clifton College, where he was a member of Polack's, the Jewish boarding house. He was of Jewish descent.
Go to Profile#1110
Ira J. Kurzban
#43158
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ira J. Kurzban is an American civil rights and immigration lawyer. He is the author of Kurzban's Immigration Law Sourcebook, published by the American Immigration Council. Kurzban received widespread media coverage during the 1980s for his representation of Haitian immigrants in Miami, and, in the 1990s and more recently, for his representation of the Haitian government and its two-time president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Go to Profile#1111
Mitchell Berman
#40142
Overall Influence
Mitchell N. Berman is an American legal scholar. He serves as the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and, in addition, is also a professor of philosophy. He is also the Co-Director of the Institute for Law & Philosophy at the university.
Go to Profile#1112
Louise Weinberg
#24639
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Louise Weinberg is an American legal scholar. She is known for her writings on legal theory, due process, and choice of law, and for her groundbreaking 1994 book, a 1200-page study on judicial federalism and judicial power.
Go to Profile#1113
Yuko Miyazaki
#41961
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Yuko Miyazaki is a lawyer and former justice of the Supreme Court of Japan, serving from 2018 to 2021. She was born on 9 July 1951. Miyazaki earned her legal education respectively from the University of Tokyo and Harvard Law School . In 1979, after having worked as a legal apprentice, Miyazaki registered with the Daiichi Tokyo Bar Association and began practicing as a taxation attorney. In 1979, she was hired as a permanent attorney at the law firm Nagashima & Ohno. She became legal counsel for the World Bank in 1984. Miyazaki also taught as a visiting professor at Tokyo University and Kyoto University.
Go to Profile#1114
Emily Buss
#52443
Overall Influence
Emily Buss is an American lawyer and law professor. She is Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Her research focuses on child and parental rights. Education Buss attended Yale University for college, graduating summa cum laude in 1982, and law school, earning a JD in 1986.
Go to Profile#1115
John Borrows
#55763
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
John Borrows is a Canadian academic and jurist. He is a full professor of law at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law. He is known as a leading authority on Canadian Indigenous law and constitutional law and has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Go to Profile#1116
Helen Durham
#66240
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Helen Anne Durham , an international humanitarian lawyer, was the Director of International Law and Policy at the International Committee of the Red Cross from 2014 until 2022. Durham served as director of international law, strategy, planning and research at the Australian Red Cross, and has worked as ICRC head of office in Sydney as well as legal adviser to the ICRC Pacific region delegation.
Go to Profile#1117
Omri Ben-Shahar
#56510
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Omri Ben-Shahar is the Leo and Eileen Herzel Professor of Law, and Kearney Director and founder of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. Prior to his tenure at University of Chicago in 2008, Ben-Shahar was the Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Michigan, and was the founder and director of the Olin Center for Law and Economics from 1999 to 2008.
Go to Profile#1118
Mark Brzezinski
#18777
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Mark Francis Brzezinski is an American lawyer serving as the United States Ambassador to Poland since 2022. He previously served as the United States Ambassador to Sweden from 2011 to 2015 under President Barack Obama.
Go to Profile#1119
Rhian Touyz
#51489
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Rhian M. Touyz Koppel MBBCh, MSc , PhD, FRCP, FRSE, FMedSci, FCAHS is a Canadian medical researcher. She is currently serving as the Executive Director and Chief Scientific Officer of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, Canada, since 2021. A clinician scientist, her research primarily focuses on hypertension and cardiovascular disease.
Go to Profile#1120
Dire Tladi
#55520
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Dire Tladi is a professor of international law at the Department of Public Law and the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa at the University of Pretoria. He is also extraordinary professor at the Public Law Department of the University of Stellenbosch. He has served as the Principal State Law Adviser for International Law for the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation and Legal Counsellor to the South Africa Mission to the United Nations.
Go to Profile#1121
James Willard Hurst
#32295
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
James Willard Hurst is widely credited as the founder of the modern field of American legal history. Educated at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1935, Hurst was a research assistant to Professor Felix Frankfurter, and later a law clerk to Justice Louis Brandeis. Hurst spent most of his professional career as a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, Wisconsin. He was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge in 1967. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1958 and the American Academy of ...
Go to Profile#1122
Dries van Agt
#22902
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Andreas Antonius Maria "Dries" van Agt is a Dutch politician and diplomat of the Catholic People's Party and later its successor the Christian Democratic Appeal party and jurist who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 19 December 1977 until 4 November 1982.
Go to Profile#1123
Michelle Obama
#11237
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is an American attorney and author who served as the first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017, being married to former president Barack Obama. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Obama is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. In her early legal career, she worked at the law firm Sidley Austin where she met her future husband. She subsequently worked in nonprofits and as the associate dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago. Later she served as, vice president for Community and External Affairs of the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Go to Profile#1124
Samuel Bagenstos
#43796
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Samuel Robert Bagenstos is an American attorney and academic who is the General Counsel of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. From January 2021 until June 2022, he served as the general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget. He is a former law professor at the University of Michigan, a job he returned to after serving for two years as the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez.
Go to Profile#1125
Lori Andrews
#10444
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lori B. Andrews is an American professor of law. She is on the faculty of Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law and serves as Director of IIT's Institute for Science, Law, and Technology. In 2002, she was a visiting professor at Princeton University. She received her B.A. summa cum laude from Yale College and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Andrews is a Fellow of the Hastings Center.
Go to Profile#1126
Jürgen Stock
#18172
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Jürgen Stock is a German police officer and academic. He has served as secretary general of Interpol since November 7, 2014. Biography Stock was born on October 4, 1959, in Wetzlar, Germany. He joined the Kriminalpolizei in Hesse in 1978 and stayed on as an officer until 1992. Between 1992 and 1996 he went to the University of Giessen to occupy himself with scientific research in criminology. In 1996 he worked as a lawyer, before returning to the Bundeskriminalamt to become the deputy head of a unit combating economic crime. Stock became President of the University of Applied Police Science l...
Go to Profile#1127
Charles N. Brower
#44657
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Charles N. Brower is a former State Department official, international judge, and recognized expert in public international law and international dispute resolution. He has been a judge of the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal since 1983. He has also served as a Judge ad hoc in three cases before the International Court of Justice since 2014. He is currently affiliated with 20 Essex Street Chambers in London, UK.
Go to Profile#1128
Anders Bratholm
#60867
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Anders Bratholm was a Norwegian professor and legal scholar. Biography Bratholm was born in Kristiania , Norway. His parents were Johan Bernhard Bratholm and Petra Marie Ratvik . He took his doctorate degree in 1958. After graduation, he was a judge prior to becoming a fellow student at the University of Oslo. He was a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Oslo from 1960, a position he held until his retirement in 1990. His legal field was primarily criminal law which he taught at the university.
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Alan C. Michaels
#69184
Overall Influence
Alan C. Michaels was the nineteenth Dean and Edwin M. Cooperman Chair in Law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Michaels was a law clerk to Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court in 1987.
Go to Profile#1130
Alejandro Guzmán Brito
#74441
Overall Influence
1945 - 2021 (76 years)
Alejandro Ángel Guzmán Brito was a Chilean lawyer and historian. Biography He was an emeritus Roman Law professor at the Law Faculty of the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso and served as rector of the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences from 1989 to 1990. Brito died of COVID-19 in 2021, at age 76.
Go to Profile#1131
Eli Salzberger
#17138
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Eli Mordechai Salzberger , is a Law Professor at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law and former Dean of the faculty. From 2008 to 2011, he served as President of the European Association for Law and Economics.
Go to Profile#1132
Jessica Dominguez
#49528
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Jessica Dominguez is an immigration lawyer based in Studio City, California. She is a radio and television presenter. Between 2012 and 2013 she hosted the radio program Pregúntale a la Abogada on Univision Radio. Currently she hosts the weekly television immigration "Ángel de la Justicia" on Univision's ¡Despierta América! and also appears on Primer Impacto's immigration segments. She is an advocate for immigration reform and has given commentary on the topic for media outlets including The Los Angeles Times.
Go to Profile#1133
Thomas E. Kauper
#61557
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Thomas E. Kauper is an American lawyer and legal scholar. He is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Michigan Law School. Kauper is best known as a property law and antitrust expert. Kauper served as Assistant Attorney General for the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division from 1972 to 1976. Kauper's more recent work focuses on European Union antitrust and competition law.
Go to Profile#1134
Henk Kummeling
#53200
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Hendrikus Rutgerus Bernardus Maria Kummeling is a Dutch professor of law. From 2005 until 2016 he was chair of the Dutch National Electoral Council. Since 2018 he is rector of Utrecht University. Biography Kummeling studied law at the Radboud University Nijmegen where he obtained a PhD in 1988 under the supervision of Constantijn Kortmann. He worked as a scientist at the Radboud University Nijmegen and Utrecht University. In 1994 he was appointed parttime professor of Constitutional Law and Administrative Law at Tilburg University. In 1995 he was appointed full professor of Constitutional La...
Go to Profile#1135
Edward McCaffery
#40717
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Edward McCaffery is an American tax law professor at the University of Southern California Law School and also a visiting professor of Law and Economics at the California Institute of Technology . An internationally recognized expert in tax law, McCaffery studies tax policy, tax structures, public finance theory, including behavioral public finance, as well as property law and theory, intellectual property, and law and economics.
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Peter Landau
#34401
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Peter Landau was a German jurist, legal historian and expert on canon law. After going to school in Berlin, where he was born, and Eisenberg, Thuringia, Landau studied law, history, and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, at University of Freiburg, and University of Bonn. After graduating, he served as the assistant of Stephan Kuttner at Yale University. After his doctoral promotion in 1964 and a habilitating in 1964, Landau accepted a call to University of Regensburg where he became a regular professor. In 1970/71 he served as Prorector of that university and in 1978/79 he was the Dean of the faculty of law.
Go to Profile#1137
Lawrence Ponoroff
#56037
Overall Influence
Lawrence Ponoroff is an American attorney and academic administrator, currently serving as a professor of law at the Michigan State University College of Law. He formerly served as the Dean of Tulane University Law School and the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law.
Go to Profile#1138
Eric Talley
#51516
Overall Influence
Eric Leonard Talley is an American legal scholar working as the IIsidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor at Columbia Law School and faculty co-director of the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership.
Go to Profile#1139
Max Kaser
#57789
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Max Kaser was a German professor of Jurisprudence who taught successively at the universities of Münster, Hamburg and Salzburg. The principal focus of his scholarship and teaching was on Roman law. He became a member of a number of learned societies. In addition, between 1958 and 1992 he was awarded honorary doctorates by no fewer than ten different universities on three different continents. An eleventh honorary doctorate, from the Jurisprudence faculty at the University of Regensburg, was awarded only posthumously, however, in 1999
Go to Profile#1140
Justin Driver
#53320
Overall Influence
Justin Driver is an American legal scholar. He is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law and Counselor to the Dean at Yale Law School, where he has taught since 2019. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale, Driver taught at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law.
Go to Profile#1141
Edward J. Balleisen
#41168
Overall Influence
Edward J. Balleisen is an American academic. He is a professor of History at Duke University, and the author or editor of several books. Early life After growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, Edward Balleisen graduated from Princeton University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1987. He earned an MPhil and a PhD from Yale University, in 1992 and 1995 respectively. From 1995 to 1997, he held a postdoctoral fellowship and teaching post at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Balleisen has taught at Duke University since 1997.
Go to Profile#1142
Gareth Jones
#55050
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Gareth Hywel Jones, QC, FBA was a Welsh academic and longtime fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge. Biography Jones was born in 1930 in Tylorstown, in the Rhondda. He was educated at the Rhondda County School for Boys, University College London, St Catharine's College, Cambridge and Harvard College. He became a teaching fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1961, becoming Senior Tutor in 1972, and was appointed Downing Professor of the Laws of England in 1974. Jones was Vice-Master of Trinity from 1986 to 1992, and from 1996 to 1999. He is a fellow of the British Academy.
Go to Profile#1143
G. Gordon Liddy
#14520
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
George Gordon Battle Liddy was an American lawyer and FBI agent who was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping for his role in the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration.
Go to Profile#1144
Christine M. Jolls
#40199
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Christine Jolls is the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor of Law and Organization at Yale Law School, where she has been since 2006. She is known for her work in the emerging theory of behavioral economics and law. Her areas of research include employment law and contracts.
Go to Profile#1145
Rafael Domingo Osle
#42452
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Rafael Domingo Oslé is a Spanish legal historian and professor of law. Education Domingo received his bachelor's and doctorate degrees in law from the University of Navarra. He conducted legal research as a Humboldt research fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany starting in 1989, and as a visiting scholar at the Columbia Law School in New York City.
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Malcolm Grant
#16979
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sir Malcolm John Grant, , is a barrister, academic lawyer, and former law professor. Born and educated in New Zealand, he was the ninth President and Provost of University College London – the head as well as principal academic and administrative officer of the university – for over a decade from 2003 until 2013. He then served for 7 years as chairman of NHS England . He has published extensively in planning and environmental law, and local government law, including serving for 23 years as the editor of the 8 loose leaf volume Encyclopaedia of Planning Law and Practice of which he remains a...
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Mick Dodson
#19075
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Michael James Dodson is an Aboriginal Australian barrister, academic, and member of the Yawuru people in the Broome area of the southern Kimberley region of Western Australia. His brother is Pat Dodson, also a noted Aboriginal leader and a senator to Federal Parliament, representing Western Australia.
Go to Profile#1148
David Rudovsky
#35724
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
David Rudovsky is a civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia. He is a founding partner, in 1971, of the law firm of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg and Lin , and a Senior Fellow at University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he teaches evidence and constitutional criminal procedure. In 1996, Rudovsky won Penn's Lindback Award for Teaching Excellence. In 1986 he was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for creative and ground-breaking work in jail reform and police misconduct litigation.
Go to Profile#1149
Hans Joachim Schneider
#27540
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Hans Joachim Schneider was a German jurist, criminologist and psychologist. He taught as Professor of Criminology at the University of Münster. Life Hans Joachim Schneider was born in Biedenkopf, a small market town in the hills between Cologne and Kassel. From 1940 till 1949 he attended the Christian Rauch School at nearby Arolsen.
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David Kairys
#53187
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
David Kairys is Professor of Law at Temple University School of Law. He is the first James E. Beasley Chair . Kairys is a civil rights lawyer. He authored Philadelphia Freedom, Memoir of a Civil Rights Lawyer and With Liberty and Justice for Some. He is a gun control proponent. He is also a strong advocate for removing money corruption from politics.
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