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,

#2651

Lucas A. Powe Jr.

#119001

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Lucas A. Powe Jr. is an American lawyer who serves as the Anne Green Regents Chair in Law at University of Texas at Austin. He is a Supreme Court historian of law. Early years and education Powe's father was from Los Angeles. Powe Sr. attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he ran the mile in track, and in 1941 was graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law. He married Nellie Sheafe, and moved near her family in Oakland, California.

#2652

Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte

#41786

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte is a Mexican lawyer and researcher who focuses on human rights and women's legal status. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores and a co-founder of the Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In addition to her work in private legal practice, she has served as a magistrate for the Superior Tribunal of Mexico City, as technical secretary for the Commission investigating femicides in Ciudad Juárez, and as a special prosecutor for crimes against women.

#2653

W. Taylor Reveley IV

W. Taylor Reveley IV

#66674

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Walter Taylor Reveley IV is a Virginia educator and lawyer who became the 26th president of Longwood University, a public liberal arts college in Farmville, Virginia, in 2013. A scholar of the U.S. presidency, Reveley was previously the managing director of the University of Virginia's Miller Center, and as the coordinating attorney for the National War Powers Commission, co-chaired by U.S. Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher.

#2654

Robert Keiter

#104380

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Robert Keiter is an American lawyer, currently the Wallace Stegner Professor of Law and Distinguished Professor at S. J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah.

#2655

Laura E. Little

Laura E. Little

#138734

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Laura E. Little is an American legal scholar and author, specializing in conflict of laws, federal courts, humor and the law, the law of freedom of expression, and constitutional law. She is the James G. Schmidt Professor of Law at Temple University School of Law.

#2656

Klaus Josef Lutz

#56351

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Klaus Josef Lutz is a German lawyer and business manager. In 2008, he took over as chief executive officer and chairman of the board of BayWa and had since shaped the listed group with activities in the agricultural, building materials, and energy sectors. Previously, as managing director, he restructured, among others, Süddeutscher Verlag, which publishes the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Lutz is considered an expert on cooperatives.

#2657

Ruth Colker

#136464

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ruth Colker is an American legal scholar working as the Distinguished Professor and Heck Faust Chair in Constitutional Law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. She was awarded the 2009 Distinguished University Professor by the university.

#2658

John Dewar

#79114

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

John Kinley Dewar is an Australian academic. He is the current vice-chancellor of La Trobe University. Education He was educated at Abingdon School and Hertford College, Oxford. Career Dewar is an internationally known family law specialist. He was a member of the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Family Law Pathways Advisory Group from 2000 to 2001 and a former member and chair of the Family Law Council from 1998 to 2004.

#2659

Jean-Pierre Machelon

#94056

Overall Influence

1945 - 2022 (77 years)

Jean-Pierre Machelon was a French academic and jurist who specialised in public law. He was dean of the faculty of law at Paris Descartes University. Biography Machelon studied at Sciences Po before defending his doctoral thesis at Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas University in 1973. From 1973 to 1979, he was a lecturer then assistant professor at Sorbonne Paris North University. He earned an agrégation in public law in 1978 and worked as a law professor at the University of Auvergne from 1980 to 1997.

#2660

Malcolm Mark. Feeley

#149934

Overall Influence

#2661

Stephen Barth

#97902

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Stephen Barth is an American lawyer, professor, author, keynote speaker and entrepreneur. He is a professor of leadership and hospitality law at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Global Hospitality Leadership at the University of Houston. He is also the co-author of Hospitality Law 5th Edition and Restaurant Law Basics.

#2662

Franklin Diederich

#150177

Overall Influence

#2663

Sara Rosenbaum

#146693

Overall Influence

Sara Rosenbaum is an American lawyer. She is the Harold and Jane Hirsh Professor of Health Law and Policy and Founding Chair of the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health.

#2664

David Kautter

#57529

Overall Influence

David Kautter is an American lawyer and tax policy advisor who served as Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury for Tax Policy. Prior to assuming his prior role of Assistant Secretary, he was a partner at accounting firm RSM International. Kautter was previously the managing director of the Kogod Tax Center and executive-in-residence at the Kogod School of Business at American University. He was a partner at Ernst & Young and served as tax legislative counsel for former U.S. Senator John Danforth. According to The Hill, "If confirmed, Kautter would oversee tax matters in the departm...

#2665

Anna Christensen

#116426

Overall Influence

1936 - 2001 (65 years)

Anna Christensen was a Professor of Private Law at the Faculty of Law at Lund University, Sweden and a columnist in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Academically, Christensen is most well-known for her books Studies in the Law of Sale of Goods , Disqualification from Unemployment Benefits and Residential Right in the Tenement House , and for the development of the Theory of Law as Normative Patterns in a Normative Field. In 1975, Christensen became the first woman professor in legal science in Sweden.

#2666

Hiroshi Hamada

#150597

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

#2667

Stavros Tsakyrakis

#141970

Overall Influence

1951 - 2018 (67 years)

Stauros Tsakyrakis was a Greek jurist and academic, Professor of Constitutional Law at Law School of the University of Athens. Biography He was born in Mithymna, in Lesbos island and attended a scholarship at Athens College. He then studied Law at the University of Athens, where he was politically active. During the period of the Regime of the Colonels he was secretary of Greek Communist Youth – Rigas Feraios and a member of the Coordinating Committee of Occupation of the Polytechnic and took part at the uprising. For his anti-dictatorial action he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured in the...

#2668

Robert J. Jackson Jr.

#82728

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Robert J. Jackson Jr. is an American lawyer and academic. He currently serves as a professor of law at New York University School of Law, where he is on public service leave. Jackson's research emphasizes the empirical study of executive compensation and corporate governance matters. On September 1, 2017, the White House announced that President Donald Trump had nominated Jackson to fill the open Democratic seat on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission . Jackson was unanimously approved by the Senate Banking Committee for the seat, and thereafter unanimously confirmed by the United Stat...

#2669

Alfred Brownell

#109011

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Alfred Lahai Gbabai Brownell is a Liberian environmental activist and lawyer. Brownell met international attention because of his advocacy to prevent the destruction of tropical forests for palm oil production. After receiving death threats as a result of his work, he and his family fled Liberia in 2016. He won the Goldman Environmental Prize, also called the "Green Nobel," in 2019 for his work protecting more than of the tropical forest that were traditional lands of local communities.

#2670

Michelle Mello

#118865

Overall Influence

Michelle Marie Mello is an American empirical health law scholar. She is a Full Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a Full Professor of Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. In 2013, Mello was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine.

#2671

Colin Campbell

#40887

Overall Influence

1944 - 2022 (78 years)

Sir Colin Murray Campbell was a Scottish academic lawyer who was vice-chancellor of the University of Nottingham from 1988 to 2008. Education and early career Campbell studied law at the University of Aberdeen, graduating with a first-class honours degree. After working at the University of Dundee and the University of Edinburgh, he was appointed professor of jurisprudence at Queen's University of Belfast, where he was dean of the law faculty and a Pro Vice Chancellor.

#2672

Brenda Cossman

#81236

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Brenda Cossman is a professor of law at the University of Toronto. She was the director at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies from 2009 to 2018. In 2012, Cossman was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

#2673

Steven L. Schwarcz

#83455

Overall Influence

Steven L. Schwarcz is an American lawyer. He is the Stanley A. Star Professor of Law and Business at Duke University. Early life and education Schwarcz was born and raised in New York City to father Charles Schwarcz. After earning his Bachelor of Science from New York University Tandon School of Engineering, he received his Juris Doctor in 1974 from the Columbia Law School.

#2674

Daniel Jositsch

#123619

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Daniel Reuwen Jositsch is a Swiss attorney and politician who currently serves on the Council of States for the Social Democratic Party representing the Canton of Zürich since 2015. He previously served on the National Council from 2007 to 2015. He briefly served on the Cantonal Council of Zürich before resigning from the post in the fall of 2007. In November 2022, he declared candidacy for Federal Council but was not officially nominated by his party.

#2675

Arthur C. Brooks

Arthur C. Brooks

#52604

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Arthur C. Brooks is an American author, public speaker, and academic. Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow. Previously, Brooks served as the 11th President of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey , From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness a...

#2676

Katya Komisaruk

#101518

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Katya Komisaruk is an American civil rights lawyer and social justice activist. She attended Harvard Law School, helped form the Midnight Special Law Collective and Just Cause Law Collective. Early years Komisaruk grew up in Michigan and California. Her father is a psychiatrist and her mother a housewife. As a child in Detroit, Michigan, Komisaruk was inspired by reading about the White Rose group who resisted Nazism in Germany. "It was important to me to know that not everybody was wrong, that there were some people who did the right thing even when everybody else was failing to stop the t...

#2677

Billy G. Hudson

#151812

Overall Influence

#2678

Lorne Crerar

#121256

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Lorne Donald Crerar is a Scottish lawyer who is co-founder & chairman of Harper Macleod and chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise. He was Professor of Banking Law at the University of Glasgow's School of Law 1997–2015. He was convener of the Standards Commission for Scotland 2003–2005 and chaired an independent review into the handling of complaints about public services.

#2679

Vojislav Maksimovic

#151983

Overall Influence

#2680

Doris Ling-Cohan

#65080

Overall Influence

Doris Ling-Cohan is a justice of the New York State Supreme Court, to which she was elected in 2002. In 2014, Justice Ling-Cohan was appointed to the Appellate Term, First Department. She is the first woman of Asian descent to be appointed to an appellate panel in New York state. Ling-Cohan was born in Chinatown, Manhattan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants.

#2681

Detlev F. Vagts

#144489

Overall Influence

1929 - 2013 (84 years)

Detlev Frederick Vagts was an American legal scholar. He was a professor of international law at Harvard Law School. Vagts was born in Washington, DC, to German Alfred Vagts and Miriam Beard, daughter of Charles A. Beard. He studied at Harvard College and later Harvard Law School, where he graduated Juris Doctor in 1951. After practicing at Cahill Gordon & Reindel for eight years—interrupted by service in the Judge Advocate General's Corps—Vagts joined faculty at his alma mater, receiving tenure in 1962. In 1984, having been the Eli Goldston Professor of Law for four years, Detlev Vagts was appointed Bemis Professor of International Law, succeeding Louis B.

#2682

Anne Bogart

#12209

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Anne Bogart is an American theatre and opera director. She is currently one of the Artistic Directors of SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Concentration and is the author of four books of essays on theatre making: A Director Prepares; And Then, You Act; What's the Story; and The Art of Resonance. She is a co-author, with Tina Landau of The Viewpoints Book, a "practical guide" to Viewpoints training and devising techniques. Conversations with Anne, a collection of inter...

#2683

George Anastaplo

#44092

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

George Anastaplo was a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and author who was famously denied admission for many years to the Illinois Bar. The denial of his admission became a Supreme Court case, In re Anastaplo, in which he insisted that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the privacy of political affiliations; in particular, he refused to answer questions about membership in the Communist Party. Anastaplo's stand was based on Constitutional principles and consequent rejection of McCarthyism, and nobody alleged that he had membership in the Communist Party.

#2684

Neil Hamilton

#94435

Overall Influence

Neil D. Hamilton "Big Deal Neil" is an American lawyer and agricultural economics writer. Hamilton currently holds the Dwight D. Opperman Chair of Law at Drake Law School in Des Moines, Iowa, where he is also an emeritus professor of law and former director of the Agricultural Law Center. He is a former chairman of the Agriculture Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools. He was also mentioned as a possible Secretary of Agriculture in the Obama Administration.

#2685

Kathryn Tucker

#102276

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Kathryn Tucker is an American attorney and the executive director of the End of Life Liberty Project, which she founded during her tenure as executive director of the Disability Rights Legal Center. This appointment to the DRLC was opposed by every other major disability rights group and has since been terminated. She graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1985 and Hampshire College in 1981. Tucker has been an adjunct law professor at Lewis and Clark School of Law, Seattle University the University of Washington, Loyola/LA and Hastings. Beginning in 1990, while an attorney at th...

#2686

Douwe Korff

#115935

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Douwe Korff has been professor of international law at London Metropolitan University since 2002. He is a Dutch comparative and international lawyer, specialising in human rights and data protection. In the 1970s, he graduated from the Free University in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and was researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. In the 1980s, he carried out human rights research at the Max Planck Institutes for comparative and international criminal law and for comparative and international public law in Freiburg im Breisgau and Heidelberg, Germany. In the 1990s, he ta...

#2687

David Threlfall

#68352

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David John Threlfall is an English stage, film and television actor and director. He is best known for playing Frank Gallagher in Channel 4's series Shameless. He has also directed several episodes of the show. In April 2014, he portrayed comedian Tommy Cooper in a television film entitled Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This. In 2014, he starred alongside Jude Law in the thriller Black Sea. In 2022, he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Play for his performance in the Martin McDonagh play Hangmen.

#2688

Wanda Phipatanakul

#152538

Overall Influence

#2689

Jean Allain

#127828

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Jean Allain is a legal scholar, author, professor at Monash University and from 2017 to 2021 had a concurrent position at the University of Hull; since 2008 has been extraordinary professor at the University of Pretoria, and from 2015 to 2019 special advisor to Anti-Slavery International. He is known for his pioneering work on modern slavery.

#2690

Sebastian Poulter

#117610

Overall Influence

1901 - 1998 (97 years)

Dr. Sebastian Poulter, who died in 1998, was a distinguished legal scholar, and an advocate of ethnic diversity and its recognition and warning against discrimination and islamophobia. Early work After studying law at Oxford, he qualified in 1967 as a solicitor in London. Later in 1967, he was appointed as lecturer in law in the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland located in Lesotho. The period from 1967 to 1971 saw the establishment of Sebastian's reputation as a dedicated teacher and the start of his long and distinguished record of research and writing, leading to seven books and...

#2691

Paul T. Jaeger

#152688

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

#2692

Ilya L. Shapiro

#152734

Overall Influence

#2693

Lisa Alexander

#145408

Overall Influence

Lisa Victoria Alexander is an international expert on heatwaves. She received the Dorothy Hill Medal for her research on climate extremes, the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, and has provided evidence that the frequency and intensity of heatwaves will be influenced by the quantity of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, in particular carbon dioxide. She was a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, including the fifth assessment report.

#2694

Frank Pallone

#64237

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Frank Joseph Pallone Jr. is an American lawyer and politician serving as the U.S. representative for since 1988. He is a member of the Democratic Party. The district, numbered as the 3rd district from 1988 to 1993, is in the north-central part of the state and includes New Brunswick, Woodbridge Township, Perth Amboy, Sayreville, Edison, Piscataway and Asbury Park. Pallone is the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

#2695

Jane S. Schacter

#137085

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jane S. Schacter is an American legal scholar who serves as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Stanford Law School with an expertise in constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and sexual orientation law. As an expert on the topic of marriage equality, Schacter has been interviewed by numerous leading news publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

#2696

David Johnston

#153082

Overall Influence

#2697

Nikkita Oliver

#57193

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Nikkita R. Oliver is an American lawyer, non-profit administrator, educator, poet, and politician. They were a candidate for Mayor of Seattle in the 2017 mayoral election, but finished third in the primary with 17% of the vote. Oliver was defeated again in an at-large Seattle city council race in 2021.

#2698

Wan Exiang

#115120

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Wan Exiang is a Chinese politician and jurist who served as a vice chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress from 2018 to 2023. He was the chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang between 2012 and 2022.

#2699

Jan Wouters

#134822

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Jan Maria Florent Wouters is a Belgian academic. He is Jean Monnet Chair, and Professor of International Law and International Organizations at KU Leuven, where he is also Director of its Centre for Global Governance Studies and Institute for International Law.

#2700

William Burke-White

#112745

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

William Burke-White is an American law professor and policy advisor. He was the Inaugural Director of Perry World House, an interdisciplinary global policy research institute at the University of Pennsylvania.

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