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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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Law,

#2251

Donald F. Turner

#82567

Overall Influence

1921 - 1994 (73 years)

Donald Frank Turner was an American antitrust attorney, economist, legal scholar and educator who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard Law School. He was also Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division from 1965 to 1968.

#2252

Dawn Dekle

#25631

Overall Influence

Dawn Dekle is an American international educator formerly serving as the fourth president of the American University of Nigeria. Education Dawn Dekle completed her undergraduate studies at Texas A&M University, going on to earn a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Dartmouth College, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

#2253

Torsten Stein

#115857

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Torsten Stein is a German jurist. He was the holder of the Chair of European Law and European Public Law at Saarland University as well as the Director of the Europa-Institut, Law Department of Saarland University from 1991 to 2012.

#2254

Catherine Lotrionte

#95561

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Catherine Lotrionte is an American legal scholar and academic, who is currently the Director of the Institute for Law, Science and Global Security at Georgetown University. She also taught in the Master of Science in Foreign Service Program and Security Studies Program at Georgetown.

#2255

Richard Marais

#75168

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Richard Malcolm Marais is Director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Manchester. Education Marais was educated at University College London where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Genetics and Microbiology in 1985. He completed his postgraduate study at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and was awarded a PhD in 1989 for research on isotypes of the protein kinase C enzyme supervised by Peter Parker.

#2256

Michael Back

#107939

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Michael John Back is an Australian lawyer. He is a senior partner of Herbert Smith Freehills and head of their Brisbane, Queensland office. He is an environmental and planning law specialist. Early life and education Back was born 26 June 1957 in Newcastle, New South Wales. He attended Newcastle Boys High School, completing the Higher School Certificate in 1975. He matriculated to the University of Sydney where he was graduated a Bachelor of Arts with Honours and a Bachelor of Laws with Honours.

#2257

Alexander Somek

#96849

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Alexander Somek is an Austrian legal scholar. Life As of 2023, Somek is a professor of legal philosophy at the Faculty of Law, University of Vienna. Previously, he held the Charles E. Floete Chair at the University of Iowa College of Law, and was a visiting professor at Princeton University and the London School of Economics. He was a Law and Public Affairs fellow at Princeton in the academic year 2012-2013 and a fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 2007-2008.

#2258

Matthew Adler

#75106

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke Law School, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. Earlier in his career, Adler was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

#2259

Wiranto Arismunandar

#51456

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Wiranto Arismunandar was an Indonesian academic. He served as the rector of the Bandung Institute of Technology from 1988 until 1997 and as a minister of education and culture for two months in 1998.

#2260

David Markus

#67390

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

David Evan Markus is an American attorney, public officer, rabbi and spiritual director. He currently serves as Deputy Chief Counsel in the New York State Judiciary, Judicial Referee in New York Supreme Court, co-chair of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, and co-rabbi of Temple Beth-El of City Island . Markus formerly served as Special Counsel to the New York State Senate Majority. A leader of Jewish Renewal, Markus resides in Westchester County, New York. Markus should not be confused with David Oscar Markus, a criminal defense lawyer — also of Harvard Law School - or David Marcus, the so...

#2261

Anna Grear

#81676

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Anna Maria Grear is an English academic, author, and political activist. Grear is the founder of several academic and activist organisations, including the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment and the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, where she is editor-in-chief. Grear is adjunct professor of law at The University of Waikato, New Zealand and was Professor of Law and Theory at Cardiff University until August 31, 2023. She has written for such international newspapers as The Wire and Süddeutsche Zeitung.

#2262

James A. Baker

#38033

Overall Influence

James Andrew Baker is a former American government official at the Department of Justice who served as general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and later served as deputy general counsel at Twitter, Inc. before being fired by Elon Musk in December 2022.

#2263

Colin Aikman

#36128

Overall Influence

1919 - 2002 (83 years)

Colin Campbell Aikman was a New Zealand public servant, lawyer and diplomat. He was professor of jurisprudence and constitutional law at Victoria University of Wellington between 1955 and 1968; first Vice Chancellor of the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji; and New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal between 1975 and 1978.

#2264

Jean-Maurice Verdier

#106791

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Jean-Maurice Verdier was a French lawyer and professor. He once served as President of Paris Nanterre University. Biography Verdier became Dean of Law and Economics at Paris Nanterre in 1970. In 1976, he became President of the university, a position he would hold until 1981. He was on the International Labour Organization Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations from 1974 to 2000. He was also President of the International Society of Labor Law and Social Security until his death.

#2265

Garth Harris

#94537

Overall Influence

1947 - 1999 (52 years)

Garth Alexander Harris was a New Zealand academic tax lawyer. He was one of New Zealand's leading tax scholars and the country's foremost writer and thinker on international taxation. Early life Harris was educated by the Christian Brothers at St Peter's College, Auckland and in his final year , he won the Taylor Cup for Languages. He studied law at the University of Auckland gaining an LL.B in 1973 and an M.Jur in 1978.

#2266

Takashi Uemura

#66444

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Takashi Uemura is a Japanese academic and former journalist who, while a reporter for The Asahi Shimbun, wrote about comfort women. He later came under scrutiny for alleged inaccuracy of terminology and omissions of information. Rival newspapers attacked him for twisting the truth, and more far-right figures went so far as to accuse him of fabrication.

#2267

Veena Dubal

#89045

Overall Influence

Veena B. Dubal is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Her research focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and precarious work. Professor Dubal is widely cited for her scholarship on gig work.

#2268

Sana Ben Achour

Sana Ben Achour

#73892

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Sana Ben Achour is a Tunisian academic, lawyer and activist, and a specialist in public law. She is a professor of public law at the Faculty of Legal, Political and Social Sciences at the University of Carthage. She is active in several feminist organisations, and has founded a women's refuge shelter.

#2269

James Woolsey

#42571

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Robert James Woolsey Jr. is an American political appointee who has served in various senior positions. He headed the Central Intelligence Agency as Director of Central Intelligence from February 5, 1993, until January 10, 1995. He held a variety of government positions in the 1970s and 1980s, including as United States Under Secretary of the Navy from 1977 to 1979, and was involved in treaty negotiations with the Soviet Union for five years in the 1980s. His career also included time as a professional lawyer, venture capitalist and investor in the private sector.

#2270

Barbara van Schewick

#112845

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Barbara van Schewick is a German computer scientist and legal scholar who holds a professorship in Internet law at Stanford Law School. Life Van Schewick studied computer science at the Technical University of Berlin and law at the Free University of Berlin. After her first state law examination, she initially worked as a lawyer in Berlin, working, among other things, at a management consultancy and as a speechwriter for the then-Governing Mayor Eberhard Diepgen. After her second state law examination, she was the first residential fellow at Lawrence Lessig's newly founded Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University for 15 months.

#2271

Beate Schücking

Beate Schücking

#44665

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Beate A. Schücking is a German professor of Health Science and Psychosocial Medicine. She is the author of numerous articles and papers on aspects of scientific research and professional education. From 2011 to 2022, Schücking was the 968th President of Leipzig University as the first woman to become President since its founding in 1409.

#2272

James Yates

#54244

Overall Influence

James A. Yates is an American lawyer and former judge from New York. He had been appointed general counsel to the Governor of New York, David Paterson, in 2008, but Yates ultimately decided to remain a judge instead. The appointment had come as a surprise, as the two are not close associates.

#2273

Kate Klonick

#104033

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Kate Klonick is an American journalist, attorney, and law professor. Early life Klonick was born to two New York judges, Justice Thomas A. Klonick and New York State Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Frazee.

#2274

Harry N. Scheiber

#97643

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Harry N. Scheiber is an American jurist and legal scholar. He is the Stefan Riesenfeld Professor of Law and History at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law where he is also the director of the Institute for Legal Research. In the latter role, he also directs the Boalt Hall School of Law's Sho Sato Program in Japanese and U.S. Law, and co-directs its Law of the Sea Institute. His work has covered multiple different legal subjects, such as the history of American law, federalism, and environmental law.

#2275

Geoffrey Eames

#93889

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Geoffrey Michael Eames is an Australian jurist, who was a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria. He served in the trial division of the Court from 1992 to 2002, and was then a member of the Court of Appeal until 2007. He subsequently served as an Acting Judge of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, and as Chief Justice of Nauru.

#2276

William Canfield

#21101

Overall Influence

William Canfield is a glycobiologist, chief scientific officer and founder of an Oklahoma City-based biotechnology company, Novazyme, which was acquired by Genzyme in August 2001 and developed, among other things, an enzyme that can stabilize Pompe disease, based on Canfield's ongoing research since 1998. Canfield subsequently left Genzyme and established, with his partner in the Novazyme operation, John Crowley, another research laboratory , which he still heads. He saved Cytovance from bankruptcy by forming an investor group and raising $9 million after Crowley suddenly left the lab in 200...

#2277

Joan Petersilia

#69012

Overall Influence

1951 - 2019 (68 years)

Joan Ramme Petersilia was an American criminologist and the Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, as well as the faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. Education Petersilia received her B.A. from Loyola Marymount University in 1972 in sociology, her M.A. from Ohio State University in 1974, also in sociology, and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in criminology, law & society in 1990.

#2278

Joshua Morse

#103750

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (101 years)

Joshua Morse was an American Professor Emeritus at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. Professor Morse's formal name is Joshua M. Morse, III. He was the Dean of Florida State University College of Law from 1969 to 1980. He also served as a Professor in the College of Law, 1969 to 1998.

#2279

John Dean

#60689

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

John Wesley Dean III is an American attorney who served as White House Counsel for U.S. President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. Dean is known for his role in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal and his subsequent testimony to Congress as a witness. His guilty plea to a single felony in exchange for becoming a key witness for the prosecution ultimately resulted in a reduced sentence, which he served at Fort Holabird outside Baltimore, Maryland. After his plea, he was disbarred.

#2280

Thomas J. Dodd Jr.

#57188

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Thomas Joseph Dodd Jr. is an American diplomat and academic who served as the United States Ambassador to Uruguay and to Costa Rica . Early life and education He gained an affinity for speaking Spanish as a teenager while going down to the docks in his hometown in Connecticut, where he often interacted with Spanish speaking-immigrants who worked as fishermen. He obtained his B.S.F.S from the School of Foreign Service in 1957. He went on to earn his Master of Arts and PhD from George Washington University, where he was also formerly an adjunct professor.

#2281

Matthew Waxman

#69667

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Matthew Curtis Waxman is an American law professor at Columbia University and author who held several positions during the George W. Bush administration. He is also currently a Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.

#2282

James Goodale

#47016

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

James C. Goodale was the vice president and general counsel for The New York Times and, later, the Times' vice chairman. He is the author of Fighting for the Press: the Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles. The book was named twice as the best non-fiction book of 2013 by Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian, and Alan Clanton, editor of the online Thursday Review. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit cited "Fighting for the Press" in its decision May 7, 2015, limiting the controversial National Security Agency domestic phone monitoring program.

#2283

Alexander Acosta

#81324

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Rene Alexander Acosta is an American attorney and politician, who served as the 27th United States Secretary of Labor from 2017 to 2019. President Donald Trump nominated Acosta to be Labor Secretary on , and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on .

#2284

Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger

#84613

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger is a full professor, senior executive, an international expert in policy, law and governance on climate change, biodiversity, human rights, trade, investment and financial law and the world's Sustainable Development Goals. She currently serves as Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge, UK; executive secretary of the global Climate Law and Governance Initiative and senior director of the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law . She is also a Fellow in Law & LLM/MCL Director of Studies at the Lucy Cavendish College; fellow ...

#2285

Russell A. Miller

#103639

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Russell A. Miller is an American lawyer, professor, author and editor. Miller grew up in the small towns of Priest River, Idaho and Salmon, Idaho and then went to Washington State University to study English literature. There he graduated in 1991 with the grade cum laude. In 1994, he received his Juris Doctor and a Master of Arts degree from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

#2286

Deborah Hensler

#89079

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Deborah R. Hensler is an American academic and researcher, currently the Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution at Stanford Law School. Professor Hensler holds a Ph.D in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an honorary doctorate by Leuphana University.

#2287

William Ian Miller

#52179

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

William Ian Miller is the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He is also Honorary Professor of History at the University of St. Andrews. His area of specialty is the sagas of medieval Iceland, but he also has written extensively on revenge and on various emotions, mostly self-attentional. He grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, received his BA from the University of Wisconsin in 1969; a Ph.D in English and a JD in law at Yale 1975, 1980.

#2288

Daniel D. Polsby

#60822

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Daniel D. Polsby is former dean of the law school and professor of law at Antonin Scalia Law School and was previously Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at Northwestern University. He retired from George Mason University in 2021.

#2289

Alberta Ferretti

#3469

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Alberta Ferretti is an Italian fashion designer and dressmaker. She designs for her namesake brand Alberta Ferretti, and designed for Philosophy di Alberta Ferretti until 2014. Her showroom is in Milan, Italy but her studio is in her native village of Cattolica, near Rimini, Italy. She was among a group of Italian designers who were invited to a reception for 200 designers and retailers held by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, in October 1988.

#2290

Hans Thieme

#101134

Overall Influence

1906 - 2000 (94 years)

Hans Thieme was a German jurist and legal historian who became a university professor in 1938. His published output was, in aggregate, considerable, although he tended to prefer to present his research conclusions in articles - sometimes lengthy articles - published in learned journals, rather than in textbooks or monographs. Themes on which he focused included legal history in the context of German history, both medieval and modern, along with European humanism, law codifications and Natural Law theory.

#2291

Kais Saied

#56034

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Kais Saied is a Tunisian politician, jurist and retired law professor currently serving as the seventh President of Tunisia since October 2019. He was president of the Tunisian Association of Constitutional Law from 1995 to 2019.

#2292

Patricia Easteal

#38755

Overall Influence

Prof Patricia Lynn Easteal PhD AM is an academic, author, activist and advocate, best known for her research, publications and teaching in the area of women and the law. In 2010 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia 'For service to the community, education and the law through promoting awareness and understanding of violence against women, discrimination and access to justice for minority groups'.

#2293

Jamie Raskin

#65636

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Jamin Ben Raskin is an American attorney, law professor, and politician serving as the U.S. representative for Maryland's 8th congressional district since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the Maryland State Senate from 2007 to 2016. The district previously included portions of Montgomery County, a suburban county northwest of Washington, D.C., and extended through rural Frederick County to the Pennsylvania border. Since redistricting in 2022, Raskin's district now encompasses only part of Montgomery County.

#2294

Allan Ryan

#52448

Overall Influence

1945 - 2023 (78 years)

Allan A. Ryan Jr. was an American attorney, author and a law school professor at Harvard University, where he was teaching from 1985 until his passing. He is best known for his work as a Justice Department lawyer who in the early 1980s identified and prosecuted dozens of Nazi collaborators living in the United States, earning him a reputation as America's foremost Nazi hunter.

#2295

Wolfgang Benedek

#72452

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Wolfgang Benedek is an Austrian jurist and author. Benedek is an emeritus university professor of public international law. He was head of the Institute for International Law and International Relations at the University of Graz from 2003 to 2016 and is co-founder of the ETC Graz and the European Training and Research Center for Human Rights and Democracy at the University of Graz and long-time chairman of WUS Austria. He is married and father of two children.

#2296

Bruno de Witte

#91624

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Bruno De Witte is a Belgian legal scholar. He is Professor of European Union law at Maastricht University, a co-director of the Maastricht Centre for European Law, and part-time Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence. He was a full-time Professor of EU Law at the European University Institute from 2000 to 2010, and Professor at Maastricht University from 1989 to 2000.

#2297

Peter Blanck

#75469

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Peter David Blanck is an American academic, psychologist, and lawyer who is the University Professor and Chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University. Early life and education Blanck was born in Elmont, New York in 1957. He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from University of Rochester in 1979, and a Ph.D. degree in social psychology from Harvard University in 1982 under the supervision of Robert Rosenthal. In 1981, Blanck was awarded the American Psychological Association’s Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award.

#2298

Timothy M. Reif

#60854

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Timothy Mark Reif is a judge of the United States Court of International Trade. Education Reif earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Public Administration from Princeton University, where he was named a Fulbright Scholar, and his Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.

#2299

Robert Jones

#58611

Overall Influence

1930 - 1998 (68 years)

Robert Walter Jones was a Cleveland, Ohio lawyer, politician, law professor, civil rights litigator and environmentalist. As an attorney, he was employed in public capacities in Northeastern Ohio as a Legal Aid Public Defender, United States Attorney, and City of Cleveland attorney. In response to the Cuyahoga River fire, as U.S. Attorney in 1970 he led the first Federal grand jury water pollution investigations and prosecutions setting into motion the recovery of the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie and the development of the Clean Water Act.

#2300

Susana Martinez

#61497

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Susana Martinez is an American politician and attorney who served as the 31st governor of New Mexico from 2011 to 2019. A Republican, she served as chair of the Republican Governors Association from 2015 to 2016. She was the first female Governor of New Mexico, and the first Hispanic female governor in the United States.

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