Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

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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).

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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Law,

#1451

Willard L. Boyd

Willard L. Boyd

#35982

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Willard Lee Boyd was an American legal scholar, academic administrator and president of the University of Iowa and Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. He was latterly part of the faculty of the University of Iowa College of Law as the Rawlings/Miller Professor of Law and President Emeritus.

#1452

Heleen Mees

#28565

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Heleen Mees is a Dutch opinion writer, economist, and lawyer. Involved with politics and public policy in the Netherlands and the US, she has also taught at universities in both countries. Biography Mees graduated in Economy and Law at University of Groningen. From 1992 to 1998, she worked for the Dutch Treasury in The Hague, for two years as spokeswoman for former State Secretary Willem Vermeend. She then worked for the European Commission in Brussels from 1998 to 2000. In 2000 she emigrated to the US, where she changed her surname from Nijkamp to Mees.

#1453

Rashida Manjoo

#26899

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Rashida Manjoo is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town and a social activist involved in the eradication of violence against women and gender-based violence. Manjoo was the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women from June 2009 to July 2015.

#1454

Robert Leckey

#63763

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Robert Leckey is the current Dean of the McGill University Faculty of Law where he is also a full professor. Education Robert Leckey graduated from Queen's University with a B.A.H. in English literature in 1997 and from McGill Law in 2002, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the McGill Law Journal. After graduation he was a clerk to Justice Michel Bastarache at the Supreme Court of Canada. He then graduated from his S.J.D. from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where he was a Trudeau Scholar.

#1455

Christina B. Whitman

#72126

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Christina Brooks Whitman is an American legal scholar who is the Francis A. Allen Collegiate Professor of Law and a professor of women's studies at the University of Michigan. She has taught there since 1976 and specializes in constitutional law, feminist jurisprudence, litigation and alternative dispute resolution.

#1456

Rudolf Steinberg

#45642

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Rudolf Steinberg is professor emeritus for public law and from 2000 to 2008 was president of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. Life After studying classics for his Abitur in Gelsenkirchen, Steinberg studied law and economic science at the universities of Freiburg and Cologne before turning to political science at the University of Michigan. In 1970 he received a doctorate from the University of Freiburg after publishing a thesis entitled Staatslehre und Interessenverbände: Interessenverbände im Spiegel amerikanischer und deutscher Literatur und Rechtsprechung“ . In 1977 he p...

#1457

Carol Moseley Braun

#28567

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Carol Elizabeth Moseley Braun, also sometimes Moseley-Braun , is an American diplomat, politician, and lawyer who represented Illinois in the United States Senate from 1993 to 1999. Prior to her Senate tenure, Moseley Braun was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1979 to 1988 and served as Cook County Recorder of Deeds from 1988 to 1992. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992 after defeating Senator Alan J. Dixon in a Democratic primary. Moseley Braun served one term in the Senate and was defeated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald in 1998.

#1458

Janai Nelson

#66100

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Janai Nelson is an American lawyer, who currently serves as the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund . Career Education Nelson earned her B.A. from New York University and her J.D. from UCLA School of Law.

#1459

George Bundy Smith

#55097

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

George Bundy Smith was a lawyer and judge in New York State. While he was a law student at Yale University, he participated in the Freedom Ride from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama. Early life Smith was born in New Orleans in 1937. He grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended Phillips Academy, where he was the only African-American in the Class of 1955. He received an A.B. degree from Yale University in 1959 and an LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1962. In addition, he earned his doctorate from NYU in Political Science. In 1961, William Sloane Coffin invited second-year law student Smith to go to Montgomery, Alabama, as a Freedom Rider.

#1460

Sami Selçuk

#35961

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Sami Selçuk , is a Turkish jurist, professor of law at the Bilkent University in Ankara. He is also former First President of Court of Cassation of Turkey. He was graduated from Ankara University, Law School in 1959 then he began to work as public prosecutor. On July 7, 1999, he elected the First President of Court of Cassation of Turkey. He retired this job on June 15, 2002. He knows French and Italian languages.

#1461

Peter Jaszi

#58182

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Peter Jaszi is a widely known expert on copyright law and author, with Patricia Aufderheide, of Reclaiming Fair Use , which examines the state of fair use and the importance to scholarship, art, and free expression of strengthening the doctrine.

#1462

Enrico Letta

#26530

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Enrico Letta is an Italian politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy from April 2013 to February 2014, leading a grand coalition of centre-left and centre-right parties. He was the leader of the Democratic Party from March 2021 to March 2023.

#1463

Mai Chen

#37705

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Mai Chen is a New Zealand and Harvard educated lawyer with a professional and specialist focus in constitutional and administrative law, Waitangi tribunal and courts, human rights, white collar fraud and regulatory defence, judicial review, regulatory issues, education law, and public policy and law reform. Chen is a barrister and holds an office in the Public Law Toolbox Chambers. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Auckland School of Law. Having served previously in the university's Business School. Chen is also the Chair of New Zealand Asian Leaders, SUPERdiverse WOMEN and the Superdiversity Institute for Law, Policy and Business.

#1464

Ingrid Detter de Frankopan

#55646

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Thyra Ingrid Hildegard Detter de Frankopan is a Swedish scholar of international law, Lindhagen Professor Emerita at Stockholm University, a practising barrister, and the author of multiple books. Education and career Detter earned a doctorate in 1962 from the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford; her dissertation was Treaty-making power of international organisations. She completed another doctorate in 1965 from Stockholm University; her dissertation was Law Making by International Organizations. As of 1988, she was Carl Lindhagen Professor of International Law at Stockholm University, and a...

#1465

Stephan Kirste

#44822

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Stephan Kirste is a German legal scholar and university professor of legal and social philosophy at the Faculty of Law of the University of Salzburg . Since 2020, Kirste is also an associate professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul in the graduate program.

#1466

Peter Rathjen

#12653

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Peter David Rathjen is an Australian scientist and medical researcher. He was the 22nd vice-chancellor of the University of Adelaide, from January 2018 through July 2020. He was previously the vice-chancellor of the University of Tasmania from 2011 to 2017.

#1467

Marcia Neave

#58101

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Marcia Ann Neave is an Australian legal academic and judge, who was appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria, Court of Appeals division on 22 February 2006. She retired from the bench on 23 August 2014 to become commissioner of the Royal Commission into Family Violence.

#1468

Leonard Strickman

#68717

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Leonard P. Strickman is an American law professor who served as Dean of three law schools, guiding two of them to various stages of ABA accreditation. Most recently, he was the founding Dean of the Florida International University College of Law, which went from establishment to full accreditation during his tenure.

#1469

Gillian Douglas

#79156

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Gillian Douglas, , FLSW is a British legal scholar who specialises in family law. She was dean of The Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London. She undertook the first empirical study into access to fertility treatment under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority's Code of Practice.

#1470

John Lott

#29288

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

John Richard Lott Jr. is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. He is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. He worked in the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice under the Donald Trump administration from October 2020 to January 2021. Lott holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.

#1471

Boštjan Zupančič

Boštjan Zupančič

#56377

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Boštjan M. Zupančič is a former Judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France and also the President of the Third Chamber at this Court from November 2004 to January 2008. Judge Zupančič obtained his Scientiae Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1981. Earlier, he obtained his L.L.M degree from Harvard Law School in 1973.

#1472

Rebecca Probert

#58951

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Rebecca Jane Probert, is a British legal historian and academic. Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, she lives in Exeter with her husband, the travel writer Liam D'Arcy-Brown. She studied for an undergraduate degree in Jurisprudence at Oxford University and for an LLM at University College, London. She currently holds a chair in Law at Exeter University. Specialising as she does in the history of marriage in England and Wales, her monograph Marriage Law & Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment is widely accepted among legal historians as having overturned previous understandings of the history of common law marriage.

#1473

Bruce Babbitt

#32699

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Bruce Edward Babbitt is an American attorney and politician who served as the 47th United States Secretary of the Interior from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He previously served as the 16th governor of Arizona from 1978 to 1987 and was a candidate for President of the United States in the 1988 Democratic primaries.

#1474

Mary McAleese

#22657

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Mary Patricia McAleese is an Irish activist lawyer, academic, author, and former politician who served as the eighth president of Ireland from November 1997 to November 2011. McAleese was first elected as president in 1997, having received the nomination of Fianna Fáil. She succeeded Mary Robinson, making her the second female president of Ireland, and the first woman in the world to succeed another woman as president. She nominated herself for re-election in 2004 and was returned unopposed for a second term. McAleese is the first president of Ireland to have come from either Northern Ireland...

#1475

Nermin Abadan Unat

#15421

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (103 years)

Nermin Abadan Unat is a Turkish academician, lawyer, sociologist, writer, and a professor at Boğaziçi University. She studies Turkish immigration as well as women's rights in Turkey. From 1978 to 1980, she was a member of the Senate of Turkey.

#1476

Stefan Vogenauer

#67666

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Stefan Vogenauer is a German legal scholar who is the director of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. He was previously Linklaters Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford.

#1477

Ed Rendell

#23815

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Edward Gene Rendell is an American lawyer, prosecutor, politician, and author who served as the 45th governor of Pennsylvania from 2003 to 2011. He previously served as chair of the national Democratic Party from 1999 to 2001, as the 96th mayor of Philadelphia from 1992 to 2000, and as district attorney of Philadelphia from 1978 to 1986.

#1478

Lucinda Finley

#48227

Overall Influence

Lucinda Finley is the Frank G. Raichle Professor of Trial and Appellate Advocacy at the University at Buffalo. Biography She has a 1980 J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, and a 1977 B.A. from Barnard College. Prior to joining the Buffalo law faculty, she was on the Yale Law School faculty, and she has also been a visiting professor at the University of Sydney Law School in Australia and an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School. In 1999, she was the distinguished visiting professor at DePaul University Law School in Chicago.

#1479

Lateef Adegbite

#43235

Overall Influence

1933 - 2012 (79 years)

Lateef Adegbite was a lawyer who became Attorney General of the Western Region of Nigeria, and who later became Secretary-General of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. Birth and education Abdu-Lateef Oladimeji Adegbite was born on 20 March 1933 into a strictly Moslem Egba family in Abeokuta, Ogun State. According to one account, he attended Methodist School, Abeokuta. He says himself that he attended Arabic School, then entered St. Paul's Primary School in Igbore, Abeokuta in 1942, when he was aged nine. Adegbite obtained a scholarship to attend King's College, Lagos, where he ...

#1480

Robert Mundheim

#57741

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Robert Harry Mundheim BVO is an American legal scholar. He is the former Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, General Counsel of the U.S. Treasury Department, Co-Chairman of the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, General Counsel of Salomon, Inc., and Fred Carr Professor of Law and Financial Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He was honored by the American Lawyer in 2014 as a "Lifetime Achiever." The University of Pennsylvania Law School has an endowed chair named after him, "the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law."

#1481

Ivan Đikić

#13179

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Ivan Đikić is a Croatian-German molecular biologist who is the Director of the Institute of Biochemistry II at Goethe University Frankfurt. Scientific career In 1991, he earned his MD degree from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zagreb. After finishing his medical studies, he continued to pursue his PhD thesis in molecular biology at the University of Zagreb and at the New York University School of Medicine until 1997. He continued to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Joseph Schlessinger in New York from 1995 to 1997 before starting his own group at the Ludwig Ins...

#1482

Jason Wu

#6789

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Jason Wu is a Taiwanese-Canadian artist and fashion designer based in New York City. Born in Taiwan and raised in Vancouver, he studied fashion design at Parsons School of Design, and trained under Narciso Rodriguez before launching his own line.

#1483

Steve Vladeck

#30158

Overall Influence

Stephen Isaiah Vladeck is the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law, where he specializes in national security law, especially with relation to the prosecution of war crimes. Vladeck has commented on the legality of the United States' use of extrajudicial detention and torture, and is a regular contributor to CNN.

#1484

Jonathan Rapping

#37509

Overall Influence

Jonathan A. Rapping is an American criminal defense attorney, founder and president of Gideon's Promise, professor of law at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School, and visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School. Rapping received the MacArthur "Genius" Award in 2014.

#1485

Jacob D. Hyman

#71115

Overall Influence

1909 - 2007 (98 years)

Jacob D. Hyman was a dean of the University at Buffalo Law School. Known to his friends as "Jack" and to former students as "Dean Hyman," the Boston native earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1931 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1934. After graduation, Hyman began his legal career in New York City with Blumberg and Parker, a medium-sized law firm with a significant administrative practice before federal agencies. Fascinated with the energetic New Deal lawyers whom he encountered in practice, Hyman moved to Washington, D.C., in 1939, joining the legal staff of the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S.

#1486

Spencer Overton

Spencer Overton

#48207

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Spencer A. Overton is an American lawyer, President of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and law professor at George Washington University Law School. He is a leading election law scholar, and is a tenured Professor of Law at George Washington University.

#1487

Jay Wexler

#56055

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Jay D. Wexler is an American legal scholar known for being the first to study laughter at the Supreme Court of the United States. His work also focuses on church-state issues, constitutional law, and environmental law. Wexler is a professor of law at the Boston University School of Law.

#1488

Charles Burson

#36282

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Charles Wainman Burson is a former legal counsel and Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States under Al Gore. He assumed the position of legal counsel from Kumiki Gibson in February 1997 after serving almost a decade as Tennessee Attorney General. In 1999 Charles Burson became Gore's Chief of Staff, replacing Ron Klain who resigned in August of that year.

#1489

Akinola Aguda

#34116

Overall Influence

1923 - 2001 (78 years)

Akinola Aguda was a Yoruba Nigerian jurist and a former Chief Justice of Botswana. Prior to becoming Chief Justice, he was a lawyer and a High Court judge in Nigeria's Western Region. He was the first indigenous African to head the position of Chief Justice in Botswana.

#1490

Edson Fachin

#22097

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Luiz Edson Fachin is a Brazilian jurist and lawyer. On June 16, 2015, he became a justice of the Supreme Federal Court. Before that, he was a professor of civil law of the Federal University of Paraná .

#1491

Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone

#22509

Overall Influence

1907 - 2001 (94 years)

Quintin McGarel Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone, , known as the 2nd Viscount Hailsham between 1950 and 1963, at which point he disclaimed his hereditary peerage, was a British barrister and Conservative Party politician who served as Lord Chancellor from 1970 to 1974 and again from 1979 to 1987.

#1492

Hershel Jick

#89920

Overall Influence

#1493

Jorge E. Viñuales

Jorge E. Viñuales

#58615

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Jorge E. Viñuales is the Harold Samuel Professor of Law and Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge, where he also directs the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance ; and a Research Professor of International Law at LUISS, in Italy. He is also the Director-General of the Latin American Society of International Law, and has been appointed as Chair of the Compliance Committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Protocol on Water and Health.

#1494

Knut Kaasen

#68351

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Knut Kaasen is a Norwegian legal scholar. He was born in Harstad, and graduated from the University of Oslo with the cand.jur. degree in 1977. He worked as a deputy judge from 1979 to 1981, was an associate professor in maritime law at the University of Oslo from 1981 to 1984 and took his dr.juris degree in 1984. He worked as a lawyer in Norsk Hydro from 1984 to 1988, and then returned to the University of Oslo as a professor of jurisprudence. He was the dean of the Faculty of Law from 2001 to 2003.

#1495

Jutta Brunnée

#77931

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jutta Brunnée is a scholar of international and environmental law who is a university professor and the Metcalf Chair in Environmental Law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. In December 2020, she was named the dean of the Faculty of Law, with a term to commence January 1, 2021.

#1496

Clay Calvert

#32543

Overall Influence

Clay Calvert is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Professor Emeritus, Brechner Eminent Scholar of Mass Communication Emeritus and former Director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project in the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, specializing in First Amendment Law. He was previously a professor at the Pennsylvania State University where he co-directed the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment. A member of the California State Bar Association, he has authored or co-authored more than 150 scholarly articles for law journals.

#1497

Stanisław Pawlak

#79753

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Stanisław Michał Pawlak is a Polish international law scholar and diplomat, ambassador of Poland to Canada , Syria , permanent representative to the United Nations , and judge of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea .

#1498

Shashikala Gurpur

#63451

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Shashikala Gurpur is an Indian author and professor, who is the director of Symbiosis Law School, Pune and Dean of the Faculty of Law, Symbiosis International University. She is a member of 19th Law Commission of India and National Academic Council. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship. She is named in the list of Top 100 Legal Luminaries of India by LexisNexis in May 2016. She was awarded Kittur Rani Chennamma Award by the Government of Karnataka in March 2019.

#1499

Peter Rosenthal

#21345

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Peter Michael Rosenthal is Canadian-American Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, an adjunct professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and a lawyer in private practice.

#1500

Robert Sedler

#73248

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Robert A. Sedler is an American retired law professor and attorney, who taught at Wayne State University Law School for over 40 years, specializing in Constitutional law. Sedler began teaching at Wayne Law in 1977, prior to which he was a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. Sedler retired in December 2020, after finishing the fall semester.

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