The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Law,
#2451
Mel Immergut
#33578
Overall Influence
Mel M. Immergut is an American lawyer who has been a partner with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy since 1980. From 1995 to 2013, he was the firm's chairman. In 2013, soon after he retired as its chairman, he received Milbank's John J. McCloy Memorial Award. His other positions include one as a lecturer at Columbia Law School, his alma mater, and the former president of the American College of Investment Counsel and The Billfish Foundation. He was interviewed on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee in 2016 regarding his considerable donations to Super PACs for losing Republican U.S. presidential candidates, including Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.
Go to Profile#2452
Charles Morris
#104115
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Charles J. Morris is an American legal scholar who is the professor of law emeritus at the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is an internationally-renowned labor law scholar and authority on the National Labor Relations Act.
Go to Profile#2453
Joern Fischer
#135393
Overall Influence
#2454
Carol Harlow
#96394
Overall Influence
Carol Harlow QC FBA is a British barrister and academic, emeritus professor of law at the London School of Economics . Her doctoral thesis was titled Administrative liability: a comparative study of French and English Law.
Go to Profile#2455
Dustin Lance Black
#38734
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Dustin Lance Black is an American screenwriter, director, producer, and LGBT rights activist. He is known for writing the film Milk, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2009. He has also subsequently written the screenplays for the film J. Edgar and the 2022 crime miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven.
Go to Profile#2456
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
#51086
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Winnifred F. Sullivan is an American author and a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington in Bloomington, Indiana, United States. She has taught such courses as The Politics of Religious Freedom, Interpreting Religion, The Trial of Joan of Arc, and Christmas: The Church-State History of the World's Most Popular Holiday. She is also the Affiliate Professor of Law in the Maurer School of Law. Her research primarily focuses on how modern religion has shaped law, the Anthropology of law and a comparative notion between Law and Society. She is on the edito...
Go to Profile#2457
Osagie Obasogie
#74503
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Osagie Kingsley Obasogie is a law professor and bioethicist at UC Berkeley. He is the Haas Distinguished Chair, Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, and Professor of Bioethics in the UC Berkeley – UCSF Joint Medical Program and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He studies bioethics, sociology, and law, in particular race in law and medicine.
Go to Profile#2458
A. Scott Loveless
#125750
Overall Influence
A. Scott Loveless is an American academic who was a law professor at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University and served as the Executive Director of the World Family Policy Center, at the BYU Law School, until the Center's closure at the end of 2008.
Go to Profile#2459
Mary Lyndon Shanley
#51624
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Mary Lyndon Shanley is a feminist legal scholar specializing in issues of the American family and reproductive technologies. Her book Just Marriage weighed into the controversy around gay marriage with a historical and political science perspective. She has written on the idea of the "ethic of care" in US political science.
Go to Profile#2460
Bruce D. Gelb
#136141
Overall Influence
#2461
Shunichi Yamashita
#38819
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
is a Japanese medical scientist serving as dean and professor at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Nagasaki University. Personal background Shin'ichi Yamashita was born in Nagasaki City, Nagasaki Prefecture, in 1952. His mother was a hibakusha who survived the atomic bomb dropped in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. He is a descendant of Kakure Kirishitans in Urakami who kept their faith clandestinely more than 200 years under severe persecution from the Tokugawa Shogunate. Yamashita himself is Catholic and belongs to Shiroyama Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Nagasaki. He is a me...
Go to Profile#2462
Jorge Bermúdez Soto
#86399
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jorge Bermúdez Soto is a Chilean lawyer and current General Comptroller of Chile. Early life He completed his whole education at the Salesianos de Valparaíso School, from where he graduated in 1986.
Go to Profile#2463
Olga Chupris
#31194
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Olga Chupris is a Belarusian lawyer, deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Belarus . She is also a Doctor of Law, and a professor. Chupris is the first female vice rector of the Belarusian State University, which is the oldest and largest university in Belarus.
Go to Profile#2464
Rosemary J. Coombe
#111372
Overall Influence
Rosemary J. Coombe is a Canadian anthropologist and lawyer, She is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication and Cultural Studies. Previously, she was a full professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#2465
Helge Breloer
#58774
Overall Influence
1937 - 2011 (74 years)
Helge Breloer née Martin was a German jurist, tree-appraisal expert, and author of nonfiction books. Life and work Helge Breloer was born in Mönchengladbach. She was the daughter of Illa und Ernst J. Martin, both dentists and dendrologists and founders of the Sequoiafarm Kaldenkirchen. She had two brothers, the landscape architect Reiner Martin and the author, editor and song composer Erik Martin. Breloer attended the School of Our Lady in Muelhausen at the Lower Rhine, Germany, and studied legal science in Cologne, Freiburg and Munich. Breloer was an expert at arboriculture, specialized in legal aspects and the appraisal of trees and shrubs.
Go to Profile#2466
Emilio Pucci
#31759
Overall Influence
1914 - 1992 (78 years)
Don Emilio Pucci, Marchese di Barsento was an Italian aristocrat, fashion designer and politician. He and his eponymous company are synonymous with geometric prints in a kaleidoscope of colors. Early life Pucci was born in Naples in 1914 to one of Florence's oldest noble families, and he lived and worked in the Pucci Palace in Florence for much of his life. He was a keen sportsman who swam, skied, fenced, played tennis and raced cars.
Go to Profile#2467
Rupert Scholz
#92714
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Rupert Scholz is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union. Early life and education Scholz was born in Berlin and received his Abitur in 1957. He studied law and economic at the Free University of Berlin the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He completed his first Staatsexamen in 1961, received his doctorate in 1966 with Peter Lerche as Doktorvater in Munich with the work Das Wesen und die Entwicklung der gemeindlichen öffentlichen Einrichtungen, completed his second Staatsexamen in 1967 and habilitated in 1971 in Munich with the work Die Koalitionsfreiheit als Verfassungsproblem.
Go to Profile#2468
Walter B. Huffman
#102989
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Major General Walter Burl Huffman, USA was an American military lawyer who served as the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army from August 5, 1997 until September 30, 2001. He has been a professor at the Texas Tech University School of Law since 2002 and was the dean from 2002 to 2009.
Go to Profile#2469
Carolyn Hamilton
#113234
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dame Carolyn Paula Hamilton DBE is a barrister who specialises in children's rights. She is also director of Coram Children's Legal Centre, an independent national charity dedicated to the promotion and implementation of children's rights based at the University of Essex. Hamilton has the position of professor at Essex.
Go to Profile#2470
Ralph Hall
#65030
Overall Influence
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
Ralph Moody Hall was an American politician who served as the United States representative for from 1981 to 2015. He was first elected in 1980, and was the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology from 2011 to 2013. He was also a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. In 2004, he switched to the Republican Party after having been a member of the Democratic Party for more than 50 years.
Go to Profile#2471
Luis Almagro
#51006
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Luis Leonardo Almagro Lemes is a Uruguayan lawyer, diplomat, and politician who currently serves as the 10th Secretary General of the Organization of American States since 2015. A former member of the Broad Front, Almagro served as Minister of Foreign Relations of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015 under president José Mujica.
Go to Profile#2472
Cheryl Saunders
#72066
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Cheryl Anne Saunders is Laureate Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. Career Saunders was the first woman to be appointed as a professor in the Law Faculty at University of Melbourne. She was also a founding director of its Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies.
Go to Profile#2473
Tawia Modibo Ocran
#97083
Overall Influence
1942 - 2008 (66 years)
Professor Justice Tawia Modibo Ocran was an academic and a Supreme Court Judge in Ghana. Early life and education Justice Professor Tawia Modibo Ocran was born on September 12, 1942, at Tarkwa-Nsuaem in the Western Region of Ghana. Christened John Tawia Ocran, he was the last child of the late Mr. Joseph Samuel Ocran, an elementary school headteacher, and Madam Ama Amireku Ocran, a housewife. Justice Ocran had his elementary school education at Tarkwa-Nsuaem Methodist School and Tarkwa Catholic School from 1949 to 1956. He entered St. Augustine's College, Cape Coast, in 1957, where he complet...
Go to Profile#2474
Michael Kilian
#114470
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michael Kilian is a German legal scholar and a former justice of the Constitutional Court of Saxony-Anhalt. Until 1982 he was the private secretary of Walter Hallstein, who was the President of the Commission of the European Economic Community.
Go to Profile#2475
Martha S. Jones
#37462
Overall Influence
Martha S. Jones is an American historian and legal scholar. She is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She studies the legal and cultural history of the United States, with a particular focus on how Black Americans have shaped the history of American democracy. She has published books on the voting rights of African American women, the debates about women's rights among Black Americans in the early United States, and the development of birthright citizenship in the United States as promoted by African Americans in Baltim...
Go to Profile#2476
Alina I. Marshall
#128880
Overall Influence
Alina Ionescu Marshall is an American lawyer who serves as a judge of the United States Tax Court. Education Marshall earned her Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from Yale University and her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she served as an Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and was inducted into the Order of the Coif.
Go to Profile#2477
Cedric Thornberry
#52767
Overall Influence
1960 - 2014 (54 years)
Cedric Henry Reid Thornberry was a Northern Irish international lawyer and Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations, for which he worked for 17 years. He spent most of his United Nations service in international peace keeping in Cyprus, the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia and Somalia.
Go to Profile#2478
Thijmen Koopmans
#97041
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Thijmen Koopmans was a Dutch judge and prominent academic. He was a judge of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands and the European Court of Justice. Biography Koopmans was born on 11 August 1929 in Amsterdam. In 1953 he earned a Doctor of Law degree at the University of Amsterdam. He then pursued a career as advocate and procurator in Haarlem. In 1956 he started at the Ministry of Justice of the Netherlands, he stayed there until 1962. He made his first move into European law when he joined the legal department of the Council of the European Communities, he stayed there until 1965. He return...
Go to Profile#2479
James L. Gulley
#85116
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
James L. Gulley is an American cancer researcher and the Director of the Medical Oncology Service at National Cancer Institute. Early life and education He graduated from Loma Linda University, California and his M.D./Ph.D. Medical Scientist Training Program, at National Institutes of Health and his dissertation on tumor immunology. Later, Gulley did his residency in internal medicine at Emory University in 1998, followed by a medical oncology fellowship at the NCI.
Go to Profile#2480
Primavera De Filippi
#80746
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Primavera De Filippi is a French legal scholar, Internet activist and artist, whose work focuses on the blockchain, peer production communities and copyright law. She is permanent researcher at the CNRS and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is author of the book Blockchain and the Law published by Harvard University Press. As an activist, she is part of Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the P2P Foundation, among others.
Go to Profile#2481
Delbert Spurlock
#121650
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Delbert Leon Spurlock Jr. was United States Assistant Secretary of the Army from 1983 to 1989 and United States Deputy Secretary of Labor from 1991 to 1993. He attended Hamilton College and then Oberlin College, receiving a B.A. from Oberlin in 1963. He then attended the Howard University School of Law, receiving an LL.B. in 1967, and then George Washington University Law School, receiving his LL.M. in 1972.
Go to Profile#2482
Kathryn Zeiler
#31330
Overall Influence
Kathryn M. Zeiler is the Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. Zeiler's work primarily focuses on health law, torts law, law and economics, medical malpractice, and disclosure law.
Go to Profile#2483
Lawrence G. Walters
#110117
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Lawrence G. Walters is an American First Amendment attorney and anti-censorship advocate. He is the head of the Walters Law Group, focusing on First Amendment and Internet law, and has served as an Adjunct Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Central Florida.
Go to Profile#2484
Vikki Ziegler
#84037
Overall Influence
Vikki Ziegler is an American lawyer and author. Her book The Pre-marital Planner: A Complete Legal Guide to a Perfect Marriage was published in 2012, and from 2014 to 2016 she was the focus of the reality television show Untying the Knot. She practices matrimonial law and is a founding partner in the firm Ziegler and Zemsky LLC. As a business person, she has founded several divorce related websites.
Go to Profile#2485
Mark E. Brandon
#90905
Overall Influence
Mark Edward Brandon is an American lawyer and academic. He is the dean of the University of Alabama School of Law. Early life Mark E. Brandon was born in Georgia and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. He graduated from the University of Montevallo. He earned a JD from the University of Alabama School of Law, followed by a master's degree from the University of Michigan and a PhD from Princeton University.
Go to Profile#2486
Mike Spivey
#133824
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Mike Spivey is an author, motivational speaker, podcaster, and the founder of The Spivey Consulting Group, and he has been featured in national media outlets including The New York Times, Reuters, The Economist, USA Today, Inside Higher Ed, the ABA Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, U.S. News & World Report, CNN/Fortune, Above the Law, and Law.com. He is a former senior-level administrator at Vanderbilt, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Colorado law schools. He was among the first higher education experts to write publicly about the possibility of university c...
Go to Profile#2488
Baik Tae-ung
#111392
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Baik Tae-Ung is Professor of Law at the University of Hawaii at Manoa William S. Richardson School of Law in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is Director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. A leading academic authority on transitional justice, social movement, and human rights in Asia, he specializes in international human rights law, comparative law, and Korean law. Baik is a well-known former South Korean prisoner of conscience.
Go to Profile#2489
Kate Shaw
#75123
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Dr. Kate Shaw is an Australian academic, planning activist and commentator, currently serving as a research fellow at the University of Melbourne. Background Kate bad Shaw worked in alternative theatre and arts publicity in Melbourne in the 1980s, before undertaking a post-Graduate Diploma in urban policy and planning and a Masters in urban planning , both at RMIT. She then moved to the University of Melbourne and taught planning law, statutory planning, urban design, and ran classes on political economy, gentrification and the cultures of cities.
Go to Profile#2490
Aleksandr Maksimovich Yakovlev
#102080
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
#2491
Hassan Al-Sayed
#122790
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Hassan Abdulrahim Al-Buhashim Al-Sayed is a Qatari Judge of the Qatar International Court and Dispute Resolution Centre. He was educated at Kuwait University , the University of Jordan and completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2003, entitled "Towards liberalising government procurement in the Gulf Cooperation Council member states". He is an associate professor of law at Qatar University, having served as dean of the college of law there from 2007 to 2010. He previously practiced as a lawyer in Qatar specialising in constitutional law, administrative disputes and state contra...
Go to Profile#2492
Jonathan Moore
#42503
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Jonathan Moore was United States Director of the Bureau of Refugee Programs from 1987 to 1989 and United States Representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council from 1989 to 1992. Biography Jonathan Moore was born in New York City on September 10, 1932. He was educated at Dartmouth College, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1954 and at Harvard University, receiving an MPA in 1957.
Go to Profile#2493
Margaret Sachs
#70491
Overall Influence
Margaret V. Sachs is an American lawyer. She is currently the Robert Cotten Alston Professor at University of Georgia. A native of Washington, D.C. who joined the Georgia Law faculty in 1990, she received her B.A. from Harvard University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Go to Profile#2494
Oren Ben-Dor
#65404
Overall Influence
Oren Ben-Dor is a philosopher living in the UK. He is a former professor of law and philosophy at the University of Southampton School of Law in the United Kingdom. He has published two books on these topics and edited a third on the troubled relationship between law and art. His work has been published in various academic and mainstream publications.
Go to Profile#2495
Murray B. Gardner
#138065
Overall Influence
#2496
Denis O'Brien
#31350
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Denis O'Brien was an American attorney, best-known as the business manager of George Harrison of the Beatles and co-founder of the film studio HandMade Films. Biography O'Brien was born on September 12, 1941, and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Ruth O'Brien and Albert James O'Brien. Albert was Vice Chairman of the Board at Ralston Purina, and also Chairman of the Board of Union Bank of Illinois, Union Illinois Company, and the State Bank of Jerseyville, Illinois, a bank that he gained control of in 1974. Denis became President and CEO of the bank in 1997, but was ousted two years l...
Go to Profile#2497
James Florio
#57503
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
James Joseph Florio was an American politician who served as the 49th governor of New Jersey from 1990 to 1994. He was previously the U.S. Representative for New Jersey's 1st congressional district from 1975 to 1990 and served in the New Jersey General Assembly from 1970 to 1975. He was a member of the Democratic Party.
Go to Profile#2498
Alberto Nisman
#58944
Overall Influence
1962 - 2015 (53 years)
Natalio Alberto Nisman was an Argentine lawyer who worked as a federal prosecutor, noted for being the chief investigator of the 1994 car bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people, the worst terrorist attack in Argentina's history. On 18 January 2015, Nisman was found dead at his home in Buenos Aires, one day before he was scheduled to report on his findings, with supposedly incriminating evidence against high-ranking officials of the then-current Argentinian government including former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, regarding the Memorandum of understandin...
Go to Profile#2499
William Powers Jr.
#34609
Overall Influence
1946 - 2019 (73 years)
William Charles Powers Jr. was an American attorney, academic, and university administrator who served as the 28th president of the University of Texas at Austin, becoming the second-longest serving president in the university's history. He held the position from February 1, 2006, to July 2, 2015, when he was succeeded by Gregory L. Fenves. Before his death, Powers held the Hines H. Baker and Thelma Kelley Baker Chair at the University of Texas School of Law.
Go to Profile#2500
John Marshall Kernochan
#111479
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
John Marshall Kernochan was a law professor, composer and music publisher who founded Columbia Law School's Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts. His pioneering work in intellectual property law helped spur stronger protections for artists.
Go to Profile