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.

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).

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List of the most influential people in Law,

#1501

Barry Sullivan

#64814

Overall Influence

Barry Sullivan is a Chicago lawyer, Professor of Law and holder of the Cooney & Conway Chair in Advocacy at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Education Sullivan attended Middlebury College in Vermont where he graduated in 1970 with a A.B. degree with high honors in philosophy and political science. While at Middlebury he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1974 he graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an associate editor of the Law Review and was a national honor scholar.

#1502

Birke Häcker

#55061

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Birke Häcker is a German legal scholar. Since January 2023 she has been Professor for Civil Law, Common Law and Comparative Law at the University of Bonn and Director of the Institute for International Private Law and Comparative Law at the University of Bonn. From 2016 to 2022, she was the Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.

#1503

Barbara Olshansky

#26680

Overall Influence

Barbara Olshansky is an American human rights lawyer. The Case for Impeachment Olshansky is author with Dave Lindorff of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office.

#1504

Thomas E. Baker

Thomas E. Baker

#57675

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Thomas Eugene Baker is a constitutional law scholar, Professor of Law, and founding member of the Florida International University College of Law. With four decades of teaching experience, Baker has authored eighteen books, including two leading casebooks, has published more than 200 scholarly articles in leading law journals, and has received numerous teaching awards.

#1505

Aviam Soifer

#64836

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Aviam Soifer is an American legal scholar who worked on high-profile matters for the American Civil Liberties Union and later served as dean of two American law schools, at the Boston College Law School from 1993 to 1998, and at the William S. Richardson School of Law at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from 2003 to 2020. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

#1506

Greg Lukianoff

#12619

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Gregory Christopher Lukianoff is an American lawyer, journalist, author and activist who serves as the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression . He previously served as FIRE's first director of legal and public advocacy until he was appointed president in 2006.

#1507

Catherine J. Ross

#69844

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Catherine J. Ross is the Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School where she is a constitutional law expert specializing in the First Amendment and civil liberties more generally as well as family law and issues affecting children and families including education and child custody.

#1508

Christopher C. Joyner

#69744

Overall Influence

1948 - 2011 (63 years)

Christopher Clayton Joyner was Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University. With Anthony Clark Arend, he founded the Institute for International Law and Politics, which he directed.

#1509

Sacha Prechal

#75816

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Alexandra 'Sacha' Prechal is a Dutch law professor and judge. She has been a judge at the European Court of Justice since 10 June 2010. She also worked as professor of European Law at Tilburg University and Utrecht University.

#1510

Marcelo Kohen

#52523

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Marcelo Gustavo Kohen is an Argentine international lawyer and academic specialised in the areas of international legal theory, territorial and border disputes, international adjudication, and peaceful settlement of international disputes. He is Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

#1511

Hiroshi Motomura

#75256

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. He is a leading scholar of American immigration and citizenship law. Awards 2006 PSP Award for Excellence, Law & Legal Studies from the Association of American Publishers for Americans in WaitingGuggenheim Fellowship

#1512

Deborah Rhode

#40663

Overall Influence

1952 - 2021 (69 years)

Deborah Lynn Rhode was an American jurist. She was the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the nation's most frequently cited scholar in legal ethics. From her early days at Yale Law School, her work revolved around questions of injustice in the practice of law and the challenges of identifying and redressing it. Rhode founded and led several research centers at Stanford devoted to these issues, including its Center on the Legal Profession, Center on Ethics and Program in Law and Social Entrepreneurship; she also led the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford.

#1513

Pierre-Marie Dupuy

#48295

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Pierre-Marie Dupuy is a French jurist. Since 1981 he is a law professor at Panthéon-Assas University, of which he is on leave since 2000. From 2000 to 2008 he was Professor of International Law at the European University Institute in Florence. Since 2008 he works in the same capacity at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

#1514

Stephen Vasciannie

Stephen Vasciannie

#36940

Overall Influence

Stephen Charles Vasciannie is a Jamaican law professor. Formerly Deputy Solicitor-General and principal of the Norman Manley Law School, Vasciannie served as Jamaica's Ambassador Extraordinary Plenipotentiary to the United States from 2012 up to July 17, 2015, when he stepped down to return to academic life.

#1515

Jack Greenberg

#43972

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Jack Greenberg was an American attorney and legal scholar. He was the Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1961 to 1984, succeeding Thurgood Marshall. He was involved in numerous crucial cases, including Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation in public schools. In all, he argued 40 civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and won almost all of them.

#1516

Michael Knoll

#64139

Overall Influence

Michael Knoll is the Theodore K. Warner Professor of Law & Professor of Real Estate at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Co-Director of the Center for Tax Law and Policy, and the Deputy Dean.

#1517

Grant Huscroft

#66583

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Grant Huscroft is a Canadian jurist and legal scholar, who currently serves as a justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. Biography Huscroft was educated at the University of Western Ontario , Queen's University , and the University of Auckland .

#1518

Herbert Kronke

#75534

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Herbert Kronke is professor of private law at Heidelberg University School of Law, and director of the Heidelberg Institute for Foreign and International Private and Economic Law. From 1998 to 2008 he served as Secretary General of UNIDROIT. From 2010 - 2011, Kronke has been Dean of Heidelberg Law School. In September 2012, he was called to serve as a permanent arbitrator and chairman of chamber three in the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal.

#1519

Ren Jianxin

#70318

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

Ren Jianxin is a Chinese retired lawyer, judge, and politician. He served as President of the Supreme People's Court from 1988 to 1998. Early life Ren Jianxin was born in Xiangfen County, Shanxi Province in 1925. From 1946 to 1948 he studied at Peking University. From 1949 to 1959 he was a clerk in the Communist Party of China's key decision-making bodies: the Central Committee's Political Science and Law Committee, the State Council Bureau of Legislative Affairs and the Office of the State Council.

#1520

David Feige

#55596

Overall Influence

David Feige is an American lawyer, legal commentator, and author. He is the author of the memoir, Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice, and co-creator of the TNT legal drama Raising the Bar, both of which center on the life of the public defender. He is also the co-founder and board chair of The Bronx Freedom Fund, a charitable bail organization in New York State. In 2016 he won the Albert Maysles New Documentary Director Award for "Untouchable" a documentary feature he wrote, produced and directed. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

#1521

Daniel Thürer

#59823

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Daniel Thürer is a Swiss jurist and professor emeritus of international, comparative constitutional, and European law at the University of Zurich. He is a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and of the Institut de Droit International, and presides the German International Law Association. Currently, he is a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.

#1522

S. Elizabeth Gibson

#80420

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sarah Elizabeth Gibson is a law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law and a former federal judicial nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Early life and education A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, Gibson earned a bachelor's degree cum laude from Duke University in 1972 and a law degree with high honors from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 1976.

#1523

Emmanuel Tawil

#56983

Overall Influence

Emmanuel Tawil is a French lawyer and academic, associate professor at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas. As a lawyer, he defended the families of the victims during the trial of the Gdeim Izik protest camp.

#1524

David Campbell

#70425

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

David Campbell is a British professor of law who joined Lancaster University in 2013 from Leeds University. Before Leeds he was professor at Durham University where he was for a time Head of the Law Department. Prior to Durham he had been professorial fellow at Cardiff University, had briefly held the Chair of Common Law at Leeds University and had been professor of law at Sheffield Hallam University.

#1525

Iván Velásquez Gómez

Iván Velásquez Gómez

#53023

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Iván Velásquez Gómez is a Colombian jurist and diplomat. From October 2013 to September 2019, he was the head of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala . In August 2022, he took office as Minister of National Defence under President Gustavo Petro.

#1526

J. A. G. Griffith

J. A. G. Griffith

#45905

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

John Aneurin Grey Griffith, was a Welsh legal scholar. Early life and education He was born in Cardiff to a Baptist family, Rev. B. Grey Griffith and Bertha. He was educated at Taunton School in Somerset, where he became a pacifist. He graduated with a first-class LLB at the London School of Economics in 1940. He was called to the bar. He was a member of the Peace Pledge Union and initially registered as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, serving two years in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He unregistered as conscientious objector and began officer training in the Indian Ar...

#1527

Rennard Strickland

#61491

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Rennard James Strickland was a Philip H. Knight Professor of Law and former dean at the University of Oregon School of Law and senior scholar in residence at the University of Oklahoma College of Law.

#1528

Clemens Jabloner

#48343

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Clemens Jabloner is an Austrian jurist who served as Vice-Chancellor of Austria and Minister of Justice in the Bierlein government from 2019 to 2020. He previously served as president of the Supreme Administrative Court of Austria from 1993 to 2013 and was a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vienna.

#1529

Hal Wootten

#51122

Overall Influence

1922 - 2021 (99 years)

John Halden Wootten QC was an Australian lawyer and legal academic and the founder of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, of which he was the Foundation Chair and its inaugural Dean. Wootten served in multiple capacities and offices, including as a Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, a Chairman of the Law Reform Commission of New South Wales, and a Deputy President of the Native Title Tribunal.

#1530

Donald G. Alexander

#60855

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Donald G. Alexander is an American lawyer and former justice on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Biography Donald G. Alexander was appointed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in 1998 by Governor Angus King. He previously served on the Maine Superior Court and the Maine District Court and as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of Maine. He served in Washington, D.C. as an assistant to Maine Senator Edmund S. Muskie and as Legislative Counsel for the National League of Cities. Justice Alexander is a graduate of Bowdoin College and the University of Chicago Law School. He is the author of...

#1531

Brian Tamberlin

#78065

Overall Influence

Brian Tamberlin is a retired Australian jurist, barrister, law commentator and justice of the Federal Court of Australia. Tamberlin was educated at Marist Brothers Parramatta where he came 10th in the State in Modern History in the Leaving Certificate that year. He subsequently received both his Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Sydney. He later received his LLM in law from Harvard Law School.

#1532

Lewis B. Kaden

#58066

Overall Influence

Lewis B. Kaden was an American businessman, attorney, legal scholar, and former political advisor who served as vice chairman of Citigroup Inc from 2005 to 2013. Early life and education Kaden was raised in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. His father operated a small trucking company. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. After he graduated from Harvard Law School, Kaden joined the legislative staff of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

#1533

Cosmo Graham

#82283

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Cosmo Graham is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Leicester. He specialises in the field of law relating to the regulation of public utilities and is co-editor of the Utilities Law Review. He also specialises in competition law and teaches constitutional law and company law.

#1534

Jesse Choper

#69707

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Jesse Herbert Choper is an American constitutional law scholar and a former Dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where he serves as the Earl Warren Professor of Public Law Emeritus.

#1535

Lisa Coussens

#90590

Overall Influence

Lisa M. Coussens is an American cancer scientist who is Chair of the Department of Cell, Developmental and Cancer Biology and Professor and Associate Director for Basic Research in the Knight Cancer Institute at the Oregon Health & Science University. She serves as President of the American Association for Cancer Research.

#1536

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.

#34786

Overall Influence

1928 - 1998 (70 years)

Aloysius Leon Higginbotham Jr. was an American civil rights advocate, historian, presidential adviser, and federal court judge. From 1990 to 1991, he served as chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Originally nominated to the bench by President Kennedy in 1963, Higginbotham was the seventh African-American Article III judge appointed in the United States, and the first African-American United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He was elevated to the Third Circuit in 1977, serving as a federal judge for nearly 30 years in all.

#1537

Dieter Nörr

#60225

Overall Influence

1931 - 2017 (86 years)

Dieter Nörr was a German scholar of Ancient Law. He studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1949 to 1953. After receiving his doctorate with a dissertation on criminal law in the Code of Hammurabi , Nörr undertook postdoctoral study at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Rome. He worked for a year as a post-doctoral assistant at the Institute for Criminal Law and Legal Philosophy under Karl Engisch. He received his Habilitation at the University of Munich, under Professor Wolfgang Kunkel, in 1959 with a work on Byzantine Contract Law and was promoted to Privatdozent.

#1538

Tom Holland

#23138

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Thomas Lee Holland is an American filmmaker. He is best known for his work in the horror film genre, penning the 1983 sequel to the classic Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho, directing and co-writing the first entry in the long-running Child's Play franchise, and writing and directing the cult vampire film Fright Night. He also directed the Stephen King adaptations The Langoliers and Thinner. He is a two-time Saturn Award recipient. Holland made the jump into children’s literature in 2018 when he co-wrote How to Scare a Monster with fellow writer Dustin Warburton.

#1539

Rebecca Dallet

#59987

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Rebecca Frank Dallet is an American lawyer and a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Prior to her 2018 election, she served ten years as a Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge in Milwaukee County. Earlier in her career she worked as a prosecutor and appointed court official.

#1540

Timothy Caulfield

Timothy Caulfield

#19115

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Timothy Allen Caulfield is a Canadian professor of law at the University of Alberta, the research director of its Health Law Institute, and current Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy. He specializes in legal, policy and ethical issues in medical research and its commercialization. In addition to professional publications, he is the author of several books aimed at the general reader and host of a television documentary series debunking pseudoscientific myths. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.

#1541

Margaret Brazier

#69301

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Margaret Rosetta "Margot" Brazier is a professor at the University of Manchester's School of Law. Margaret is married to Rodney Brazier, a professor of constitutional law also at the University of Manchester.

#1542

Subhan Aliyev

#82744

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Subhan Farmayil oglu Aliyev is an Azerbaijani lawyer, Professor of the Department of Constitutional Law at Baku State University Law School , Doctor of Law, Head of the Department of State and Constitutional Law of the ANAS Institute on Law and Human Rights , and Member of the Azerbaijani Bar Association.

#1543

Gerhard Schricker

#76577

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Gerhard Schricker was a German legal scholar with a focus on intellectual property and competition law. He was a full professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1973 to 2000 and served as Director of the Munich-based Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Law between 1971 and 2003.

#1544

Nino Burjanadze

#39886

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Nino Burjanadze is a Georgian politician and lawyer who served as Chairperson of the Parliament of Georgia from November 2001 to June 2008. As the first woman, she has served as the acting head of state of Georgia twice; the first time from 23 November 2003 to 25 January 2004 in the wake of Eduard Shevardnadze's resignation during the Rose Revolution, and again from 25 November 2007 to 20 January 2008, when Mikheil Saakashvili stepped down to rerun in the early presidential elections. She withdrew into opposition to Saakashvili as the leader of the Democratic Movement-United Georgia party in 2008.

#1545

A. Leo Levin

#38005

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

A. Leo Levin was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Biography Levin was born in New York City to Issaachar and Minerva Hilda Levin, and grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. His father was an Orthodox rabbi and Mizrachi leader. He was Jewish. He and his wife Doris had two sons, Allan and Jay.

#1546

Nelly Ognyanova

Nelly Ognyanova

#58456

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Nelly Ognyanova is a prominent Bulgarian media law expert, member of the Bulgarian electronic media and telecommunications regulators between 1998 and 2001. In the academic sphere, Ognyanova is Doctor in Law, Doctor Habilitatus in Political Science, Professor at Sofia University. She was head of the European Studies chair at Sofia University from its creation in 1999 till 2007.

#1547

James Tomkovicz

#74817

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

James Joseph "Jim" Tomkovicz is an American educator and legal scholar. He was a professor of law at the University of Iowa College of Law from 1982 until 2021, when he retired from Iowa. While at Iowa he was awarded a chaired professorship, being named the Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law. After his four decades at Iowa, he was appointed Dean’s Professor at the Emory University School of Law for two years, an appointment which ended in 2023. Tomkovicz regularly taught Criminal Procedure , Criminal Law, and Evidence. He authored a number of scholarly works, almost all devoted to constitutional criminal procedure topics.

#1548

Kimberlee Weatherall

Kimberlee Weatherall

#76184

Overall Influence

Kimberlee "Kim" Weatherall is an Australian intellectual property lawyer and professor of law at the University of Sydney Law School specialising in issues at the intersection of law and technology, as well as intellectual property law.

#1549

Daniel Richman

#47379

Overall Influence

Daniel C. Richman is an American attorney. He is the Paul J. Kellner Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Education Richman received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1980 and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1984.

#1550

Paul O'Higgins

#52692

Overall Influence

1927 - 2008 (81 years)

Paul O'Higgins was a noted Irish scholar of human rights and labour law. The Times credits O'Higgins as "one of the founding fathers of the academic study of labour law and social security law" in Britain. According to Professor Keith Ewing, O'Higgins "was at the forefront of an innovation in legal teaching and scholarship, which encouraged lawyers to appreciate how law worked in practice, and to reflect on the social context of the legal rules they examined." According to Professor Suttvinder Juss, O'Higgins was "a mentor of unfathomable talent and achievements, who left his mark on all who ...

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