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.

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List of the most influential people in Law,

#1801

Harry Litman

#68209

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Harry P. Litman is an American lawyer, law professor and political commentator. He is a former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General. He has provided commentary in print and broadcast news and produces the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught in multiple law schools and schools of public policy.

#1802

Shahen Nikolay Petrosyan

Shahen Nikolay Petrosyan

#75693

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Shahen Nikolay Petrosyan was a lawyer, doctor of law, professor, honored lawyer of the Armenian SSR, Chairman of the Supreme Court of Armenia, Dean of the Faculty of Law of Yerevan State University, Head of Department of the History of the State and Law.

#1803

Abraham S. Goldstein

#90826

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

Abraham Samuel Goldstein was a law professor and the eleventh dean of the Yale Law School. Biography Goldstein served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He received an undergraduate degree in economics from City College of New York in 1946 and then entered the Yale Law School, from which he received an LL.B. in 1949. He subsequently served as the first law clerk of Judge David L. Bazelon of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. After clerking, Goldstein joined the Yale Law faculty in 1956, was named a full professor in 1961, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law in 1967, and Sterling Professor of Law in 1975.

#1804

Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

#60651

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Dorit Rubinstein Reiss is a Professor of Law and the James Edgar Hervey '50 Chair of Litigation at UC Hastings College of Law. She has also worked for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israeli Ministry of Justice's Department of Public Law.

#1805

Horst Schüler-Springorum

#79841

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Horst Schüler-Springorum was a German Professor of Jurisprudence. The focus of his work was on Criminal justice. When he died a tribute in the news magazine Der Spiegel asserted that throughout his [adult] life Horst Schüler-Springorum campaigned for prison reform and for an enlightened and intelligent approach to criminal justice. His best known publication, "Kriminalpolitik für Menschen" appeared in 1991.

#1806

Richard H. Bernstein

#76504

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Richard H. Bernstein is an American lawyer and Michigan Supreme Court Justice. He practiced at The Law Offices of Sam Bernstein, his father's law office, in Farmington Hills, Michigan, before being elected to the Michigan Supreme Court. He was an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan and served on the Wayne State University Board of Governors for one eight-year term, including two years as vice chair and two more as chair until deciding not to seek re-election in 2010 for a second term beginning in 2011. In November 2014, Bernstein was elected to serve an 8-year term on the Michigan Supreme Court.

#1807

Nii Ashie Kotey

#55077

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Nii Ashie Kotey is a Ghanaian judge and academic. He served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana from 3 October 2018 until his retirement on 28 July 2023. Appointment Kotey was nominated together with three other judges by the president of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo in 2018. He together with the three judges were recommended to the president by the three nominating bodies, the Chief Justice of Ghana, Attorney General of Ghana and the Ghana Bar Association. A letter was sent to the president by the then Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo on behalf of the Judicial Council to recommend the judges to the president.

#1808

Kenneth Crews

#87498

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Kenneth D. Crews is an American copyright scholar and librarian. He is particularly noted for his scholarship around educational and library exceptions in copyright law, and was commissioned by WIPO to write an examination of those exceptions around the world. He is a frequent speaker and consultant on library-related copyright matters, and was called for expert testimony in the Cambridge University Press v. Becker copyright case challenging the practice of Georgia State University's e-reserves system. Crews is noted for pioneering the concept of the "fair use checklist", which has enjoyed w...

#1809

Karolos Papoulias

#50397

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Karolos Papoulias was a Greek politician who served as the president of Greece from 2005 to 2015. A member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement , he previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1985 to 1989 and again from 1993 until 1996.

#1810

Bakır Çağlar

#82939

Overall Influence

1941 - 2011 (70 years)

Bakır Çağlar was a Turkish jurist, lawyer and professor of constitutional law at Istanbul University Faculty of Political Sciences. He was defense lawyer of Turkey in the European Court of Human Rights for seven years.

#1811

Roman Tokarczyk

Roman Tokarczyk

#54940

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

Roman Andrzej Tokarczyk is a legal scholar and philosopher, full professor, lecturing at the Faculty of Law and Administration, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, and at the Faculty of Management and Administration of the Zamość University of Management and Administration. He specializes in ethics, history of political law doctrines, comparative legal studies, philosophy of law and in American law. He has authored popular books in these fields and translated works of Hobbes and Fuller.

#1812

Kevin Boyle

#34374

Overall Influence

1943 - 2010 (67 years)

Christopher Kevin Boyle was a Northern Irish-born human rights activist, barrister and educator. He was among the first in the academic law community to engage in human rights activism. Born and brought up in Newry, Boyle studied law at Queen's University Belfast. He was a lecturer in law at Queen's when he took part in the 1969 People's Democracy march from Belfast to Derry which was attacked by loyalists at Burntollet. He was later involved in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Boyle's brother, Louis Boyle, also an alumnus of Queen's, was at the time active as a Catholic Unioni...

#1813

John K. McNulty

#76612

Overall Influence

1934 - 2020 (86 years)

John Kent McNulty was an American legal scholar, who was a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law for 38 years from 1964 to 2002 and who as a legal educator and scholar, was influential in shaping U.S. tax law policy debate during the later quarter of the 20th century.

#1814

Kinch Hoekstra

#79568

Overall Influence

Kinch J. Hoekstra is an American legal scholar and academic whose work concerns the history of political, moral, and legal thought. He is Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Law and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Faculty Director of the Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Hoekstra has held visiting positions, lectureships, and fellowships at the University of Oxford, Princeton University, Boston University, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

#1815

Paul Cullen, Lord Pentland

#81478

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Paul Benedict Cullen, Lord Pentland, is a former Solicitor General for Scotland, a Senator of the College of Justice and former Chairman of the Scottish Law Commission. Early life Born in Gosforth, Northumberland, he was educated at St Augustine's High School, Edinburgh and at the School of Law of the University of Edinburgh.

#1816

Bernard Bell

#72467

Overall Influence

Bernard Bell is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Professor of Law and Herbert Hannoch Scholar at Rutgers School of Law–Newark. Career Bell received a B.A. cum laude from Harvard and a J.D. from Stanford, where he was notes editor of the Stanford Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. He clerked for Judge Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White and then practiced with Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City. Before coming to Rutgers in 1994, he served as senior litigation counsel and, earlier, as Assistant U.S.

#1817

Jacqueline Dutheil de la Rochère

#26971

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Jacqueline Dutheil de la Rochère is a French aristocrat, Professor Emerita of Law and former President of Panthéon-Assas University in Paris. Early life Jacqueline de Raguet de Brancion was born on December 18, 1940 in Nîmes, France. Her father was Jacques Chatel de Raguet de Brancion and her mother, Françoise Barbier.

#1818

Serap Yazıcı

#32230

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Serap Yazıcı is a Turkish politician and academic of Constitutional Law. She was a member of a committee tasked with drafting a proposal for the new constitution of Turkey. A member of the Republican People's Party, she was elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey from Antalya in the 2023 Turkish parliamentary election.

#1819

Gerald Freedman

#23204

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

Gerald Alan Freedman was an American theatre director, librettist, and lyricist, and a college dean. Life and career Freedman was born in Lorain, Ohio, the son of Fannie , a history teacher, and Barnie B. Freedman, a dentist. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Northwestern University under Alvina Krause and others. He earned both BA and MA degrees there. He began his career as assistant director of such projects as Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, and Gypsy. His first credit as a Broadway director was the 1961 musical The Gay Life. Additional Broadway credits in...

#1820

Ashtar Ausaf Ali

Ashtar Ausaf Ali

#26459

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ashtar Ausaf Ali is a Pakistani lawyer who twice served as the Attorney General for Pakistan from 2016 to 2018, and from 2022 to 2023. In his first term, he co-drafted the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan, which merged the Federally Administered Tribal Areas with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

#1821

Ivan Pavlov

#39203

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Ivan Yuryevich Pavlov is a Russian advocate and open government activist. He participated in the development of Russian federal and regional freedom of information legislation. He specializes in protecting the right to access government information in Russia, and defending citizens from ungrounded accusations of disclosing state secrets, high treason, and espionage. Additionally, he focuses on raising public awareness of the need for modern legislation on state secrets and the use of current legislation as a means of repression.

#1822

James Rasband

#100847

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

James R. Rasband is an American academic and religious leader who has been a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since April 2019. He was previously the Academic Vice President at Brigham Young University from June 2017 until shortly after he was called as a general authority. He also previously served as dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School . He has also been the Hugh W. Colton Professor of Law.

#1823

Mark Osler

#59722

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Mark William Osler is an American legal scholar and prosecutor. Osler currently serves as Deputy County Attorney for Hennepin County, Minnesota, supervising criminal prosecutions. Prior to his appointment in 2023 by County Attorney Mary Moriarty, he was a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minnesota, holding the Robert and Marion Short Distinguished Chair in Law at St. Thomas and the Ruthie Mattox Chair of Preaching at First Covenant Church, Minneapolis. He began work as a law professor at Baylor University in 2000 before leaving for St. Thomas in 2010.

#1824

Alec Stone Sweet

#80039

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Alec Stone Sweet is an American political scientist and jurist. He is Professor and Chair of Comparative and International Law at The University of Hong Kong. Scholarship Stone Sweet graduated from Western Washington University , the Johns Hopkins SAIS , and the University of Washington .

#1825

Dennis O'Connor

#39073

Overall Influence

Dennis R. O'Connor, was the Associate Chief Justice of Ontario from 2001–2012 and sat on the Court of Appeal for Ontario from 1998–2012. O'Connor attended De La Salle College and Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto. He practised law from 1973 until 1976. From 1976 to 1980 he became a teacher at the University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law and from there went to practise litigation at Borden, Elliot in Toronto. He was a negotiator for the Government of Canada in the Yukon land claim debate.

#1826

Richard McLaren

#17018

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Richard Henry McLaren is a law professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, specializing in sports law. In 2015, he was one of the three members of the WADA Commission, an independent panel commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency to investigate allegations of state-sponsored doping in Russian sports. He was awarded the Order of Canada with the grade of officer in 2015.

#1827

Neal Katyal

#66601

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Neal Katyal is the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law for Georgetown University’s Law Center and a practice lawyer and partner at Hogan Lovells. He earned his A.B. from Dartmouth College and J.D. from Yale University. He has been named Grand Prize Litigator of the Year by American Lawyer Magazine two different years - 2016 and 2017. His career has been punctuated by significant achievements. He drafted the special counsel regulations that were used as guidelines for Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian disruptive efforts preceding the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

#1828

Chuan Leekpai

#18666

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Chuan Leekpai is a Thai politician who is the former President of the National Assembly of Thailand as well as the Speaker of the Thai House of Representatives from 2019 to 2023. Previously he served as the Thai prime minister in 2 terms from 20 September 1992 to 19 May 1995 and again from 9 November 1997 to 9 February 2001.

#1829

Surya Subedi

#76941

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Surya Prasad Subedi OBE KC DCL is a British-Nepalese jurist. He is Professor of International Law at the University of Leeds, a member of the Institut de Droit International, and a barrister in London. He also is a visiting professor on the international human rights law programme of the University of Oxford. He served as the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Cambodia for six years . He also served for five years, starting in 2010, on an advisory group on human rights to the British Foreign Secretary. In 2021, he was appointed legal procedural advisor to the World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature held in Marseille, France.

#1830

Gerry Simpson

#73748

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Gerry John Simpson is a professor of law at the London School of Economics and the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. He was born in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire. Simpson studied law at the University of Aberdeen, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he received his doctorate of law. He has taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Melbourne, and the Australian National University. He has also served as a visiting professor at Sydney Law School and Harvard Law School .

#1831

Pedro Nikken

#69031

Overall Influence

1945 - 2019 (74 years)

Pedro Antonio Nikken Bellshaw was a Venezuelan lawyer and jurist. Background He studied law at the Andrés Bello Catholic University Law School, graduating in 1968. In 1973 he obtained a diploma from higher studies at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas and in 1977, a doctorate in law from the University of Carabobo.

#1832

Tom Cotton

#38423

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Thomas Bryant Cotton is an American politician, attorney, and former military officer serving as the junior United States senator from Arkansas since 2015. A member of the Republican Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2013 to 2015.

#1833

Mayo Moran

#71211

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Mayo Moran is a Canadian lawyer and academic. From 2006 to 2014, she was Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto. She was the first female dean of that faculty. In addition, since 2014, she has been Provost of Trinity College, Toronto.

#1834

Michael S. Moore

#47972

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Michael S. Moore is an American lawyer, focusing on constitutional law, criminal law, and jurisprudence. He is currently the Charles R. Walgreen Chair at University of Illinois. Moore graduated from South Eugene High School, in Eugene, Oregon, in 1961. He earned his A.B. in Political Science from the University of Oregon, earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1967, and earned an S.J.D. from Harvard University in 1978.

#1835

Tony Downes

#12064

Overall Influence

Tony Downes is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Law of the University of Reading. Downes specialises in commercial law and was educated at the University of Oxford and Aix-Marseille University.

#1836

Philip B. Kurland

#86353

Overall Influence

1921 - 1996 (75 years)

Philip B. Kurland was an American legal scholar. Kurland was a Brooklyn native, born on October 22, 1921. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942, and attended Harvard Law School. Kurland served as editor of the Harvard Law Review in 1944. He became a law clerk for Jerome Frank, and then served Justice Felix Frankfurter in the same role from 1945 to 1946. Kurland worked for the United States Department of Justice, and began his legal practice in New York City before starting his teaching career at Indiana University. Kurland was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949. The next year, he joined the Northwestern University faculty.

#1837

Alex Spiro

#40810

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Alexander Benjamin Spiro is an American attorney. He is a partner at the New York office of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. Early life and education Spiro was born in New York and grew up in Boston. He is the eldest of four children to a clinical psychologist mother and a dentist father.

#1838

Leslye Obiora

#36433

Overall Influence

Leslye Amede Obiora is a Nigerian lawyer and professor. Her written work focuses on culture, gender, human rights, and public international law. Early life and education Leslye Amede Obiora is from Oguta, a riverine Igbo community in Nigeria. She was born on the cusp of the pogrom that triggered the Biafra Secessionist War to Violet Odiso and Samson B. C. Obiora. Her father was a lawyer and her mother earned a diploma in Home Economics, before marrying in 1951. Obiora was one of nine children born to the couple before her father’s death in 1973. Obiora completed her studies earning an LLB fr...

#1839

Rufus Black

#19461

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Rufus Edward Ries Black is the vice-chancellor of the University of Tasmania. Early life and education Black was educated at Wesley College and the University of Melbourne, where he resided at Ormond College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in politics and economics and a Bachelor of Laws with honours in 1994. He won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1992, and obtained a Diploma of Theology and Master of Philosophy in Ethics and Theology in 1994 from Keble College, Oxford. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in Ethics and Theology from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1996. His DPhil thesis was entit...

#1840

Roy Amara

#30817

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

Roy Charles Amara was an American researcher, scientist, futurist and president of the Institute for the Future best known for coining Amara's law on the effect of technology. He held a BS in Management, an MS in the Arts and Sciences, and a PhD in Systems Engineering, and also worked at the Stanford Research Institute.

#1841

Mark Nuckols

#36593

Overall Influence

Mark Nuckols is a writer and regular commentator on Russian television. He appears on various political talk shows. He also writes for various publications, including The New York Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor and others. He has taught at the Lomonosov Moscow State University Business School and at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. He has a JD from Georgetown Law and an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He grew up in rural Virginia.

#1842

C. Edwin Baker

#67429

Overall Influence

1947 - 2009 (62 years)

C. Edwin Baker , the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, was a leading scholar of constitutional law, communications law, and free speech.

#1843

George Gretton

#87893

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

George Lidderdale Gretton WS FRSE is a Scottish lawyer and academic and, from May 2006 to May 2011, was a Commissioner of the Scottish Law Commission. Career Gretton had his early education at West House School and King Edward's, Birmingham. In 1972 he graduated with a 2:1 degree in Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Durham . He then read law at the University of Edinburgh. He was appointed to a lectureship in law at the university in 1981. He became Lord President Reid Professor of Law in 1994 and held the chair until his retirement in 2016 when he became Professor Emeritus.

#1844

Emily Jackson

#69539

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Emily Meg Jackson, is a British legal scholar who specialises in medical law. She has been Professor of Law at the London School of Economics since 2007 and Head of its Law Department since 2012. She has previously researched or lectured at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, at Birkbeck College, University of London, and at Queen Mary, University of London.

#1845

Cecilia Medina

#38681

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Cecilia Medina Quiroga is a Chilean jurist. Biography Cecilia Medina studied legal and social sciences at the University of Chile in Santiago and earned a doctorate in law at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

#1846

Alfred Brophy

#84914

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Alfred L. Brophy is an American legal scholar. He is retired. He held the Paul and Charlene Jones Chair in law at the University of Alabama from 2017 to 2019. Early life Brophy was born in Champaign, Illinois. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree. He earned a J.D. from Columbia University, where he was an editor of the Columbia Law Review, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he held a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship.

#1847

Edward Somers

#70568

Overall Influence

1928 - 2002 (74 years)

Sir Edward Jonathan Somers was a New Zealand jurist and member of the Privy Council. Biography Somers was born in Christchurch in 1928, and was educated at Christ's College and the University of Canterbury, where he gained a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws. In 1952, Somers became engaged to Mollie Louise Morison, and they later married and went on to have three children.

#1848

Edward Imwinkelried

#61071

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Edward John Imwinkelried is an American educator and law scholar. the Edward L. Barrett, Jr. Professor of Law Emeritus at the UC Davis School of Law . Imwinkelried is the most cited legal academic in the country in the area of Evidence law. His book, Scientific Evidence, was cited twice by the U.S. Supreme Court in the ground-breaking evidence case, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals.

#1849

Mark Denbeaux

#51802

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Mark P. Denbeaux is an American attorney, professor, and author. He is a law professor at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, New Jersey and the Director of its Center for Policy and Research.

#1850

Carrie Menkel-Meadow

#61458

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Carrie Menkel-Meadow is an American lawyer and scholar of dispute resolution. In 2018, she was the recipient of the Outstanding Scholar Award by the American Bar Foundation. Early life and education Menkel-Meadow graduated with an A.B. in sociology from Barnard College in 1971 and earned her J.D. from University of Pennsylvania Law School.

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