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,
#3601
August Ludwig Schott
1751 - 1787 (36 years)
August Ludwig Schott was a German lawyer and professor. August Ludwig Schott was a lawyer, solicitor and professor for law in Tübingen and later court counselor in Erlangen. Life August Ludwig Schott was the son of Christoph Friedrich Schott, a priest and professor in Tübingen. He studied in Tübingen, matriculated in 1768, then studied law and received a law degree in 1772.
Go to Profile#3602
Charles Hastings Collette
1816 - 1901 (85 years)
Charles Hastings Collette was a British 19th-century solicitor and writer of Protestant popular controversialist apologetics. He was the father of actor Charles Henry Collette and the organizer of the Joseph Mendham library. As a volunteer in the First Middlesex Artillery, he compiled a handbook for drill instruction.
Go to Profile#3603
Frederick Edmund Meredith
1862 - 1941 (79 years)
Frederick Edmund Meredith was a Canadian lawyer and businessman. He was the 8th Chancellor of Bishop's University; President of the Mount Royal Club; Bâtonnier of the Bar of Montreal; President of the Montreal Victorias for three of their Stanley Cup championships in the late 1890s, and Chief Counsel to the CPR at the inquest into the sinking of RMS Empress of Ireland.
Go to Profile#3604
John Simpson
John Simpson was a United States Army officer, attorney, and politician. Simpson saw military action in both the Northwest Indian War and the War of 1812. He also served 4 terms in the Kentucky House of Representatives including 2 years as the House's Speaker. In 1812 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives but died before he could take office.
Go to Profile#3605
James Thompson
1806 - 1874 (68 years)
James Thompson was a lawyer, politician and jurist from Pennsylvania. He served in the United States Congress and in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he was Speaker in 1835. He also served as a federal judge and as a member of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#3606
Jack Cassidy
1927 - 1976 (49 years)
John Joseph Edward Cassidy was an American actor, singer and theater director known for his work in the theater, television and films. He received multiple Tony Award nominations and a win, as well as a Grammy Award, for his work on the Broadway production of the musical She Loves Me. He also received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He was the father of teen idols David Cassidy and Shaun Cassidy.
Go to Profile#3607
John James McCook
1843 - 1927 (84 years)
John James McCook, Jr. was a chaplain in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and postbellum lawyer, professor, and theologian. He was a member of the Fighting McCooks, a family of Ohioans who contributed 15 members to the Union army.
Go to Profile#3608
John Lindsay of Balcarres, Lord Menmuir
1552 - 1598 (46 years)
John Lindsay of Balcarres was Secretary of State, Scotland. On 5 July 1581 he was appointed a Lord of Session under the title Lord Menmuir. Life He was the second son of David Lindsay, 9th Earl of Crawford and Catherine Campbell, daughter of Sir John Campbell of Lorn. Along with his brother, Lord Edzell, he was sent under the care of James Lawson to complete his education on the continent. The French Wars of Religion meant they had to return rapidly from Paris to Dieppe, then moving to the University of Cambridge; however, as there is no record of him in Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses John ma...
Go to Profile#3609
Maddalena Buonsignori
Maddalena Buonsignori was a 14th-century law professor at the University of Bologna. Buonsignori taught jurisprudence in 1380. Around this time other women were given similar opportunities at Bologna University, however this opportunity was unique to the school. She wrote a Latin treatise, De Legibus Connubialibus, in which she explored the legal status of the women in her time from various points of view.
Go to Profile#3610
Thomas Percival Creed
1897 - 1969 (72 years)
Sir Thomas Percival Creed, KBE, MC, QC was a lawyer and educationist. Principal of Queen Mary College London from 1952 to 1967, he served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1964 to 1967.
Go to Profile#3611
Tsuneko Gauntlett
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Tsuneko Yamada Gauntlett , born Yamada Tsune, was a Japanese temperance, suffrage, and peace activist. In 1937 she was international president of the Pan-Pacific Women's Association. Early life Yamada Tsune was born in what is now part of the city of Anjō, Aichi, the daughter of a samurai, Yamada Kenzō. Her younger brother was composer Kosaku Yamada. She was educated at the Sakurai Girls' School, where one of her teachers was Yajima Kajiko.
Go to Profile#3612
Matthew Wesenbeck
1531 - 1586 (55 years)
Matthew Wesenbeck was a Belgian jurist and a student of Gabriel Mudaeus. His Latin surname was also spelled Wesembecius or Vesembecius. Wesenbeck was a Protestant writer widely known and cited during his time. He taught at Jena and Wittenberg.
Go to Profile#3613
Dietrich Flade
1534 - 1589 (55 years)
Dietrich Flade was a German lawyer, judge and educator. He was one of the most known victims of the Trier witch trials. He was active as a judge during the Trier witch trials until he himself was arrested and executed for sorcery.
Go to Profile#3614
Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando
1772 - 1842 (70 years)
Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando, born Joseph Marie Degérando , was a French jurist, philanthropist and philosopher of Italian descent. He is most remembered for his 1804 book Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, considérés relativement aux principes des connaissances humaines as well as his 1820 study of benevolent activity, Le visiteur du pauvre . He influenced Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson who used his philosophical framework extensively in support of his own first book Nature.
Go to Profile#3615
Georgius Merula
1430 - 1494 (64 years)
Georgius Merula was an Italian humanist and classical scholar. Life Merula was born in Alessandria in Piedmont. The greater part of his life was spent in Venice and Milan, where he held a professorship and continued to teach until his death. While he was teaching at Venice, he was the subject of a personal polemic by Cornelio Vitelli, directed at his scholarship; and Vitelli replaced him in 1483.
Go to Profile#3616
Thomas H. Malone
1834 - 1906 (72 years)
Thomas H. Malone was an American Confederate veteran, judge, businessman and academic administrator. He served as the President of the Nashville Gas Company from 1893 to 1906. He served as the second Dean of the Vanderbilt University Law School from 1875 to 1904.
Go to Profile#3617
W. C. J. Meredith
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
William Campbell James Meredith , often referred to as W. C. J. Meredith, was a Canadian lawyer, the author of three legal texts, and Dean of the McGill University Faculty of Law . In 1951, he was noted for the prescient hiring of John Cobb Cooper to head up the new department he created, McGill's Institute of Air Space Law.
Go to Profile#3618
Onissim Goldovsky
1865 - 1922 (57 years)
Onissim Borisovich Goldovsky was a Russian attorney, political philosopher and activist, author, and champion of Jewish causes. A so-called "Westerner" influenced by ideas of the French enlightenment, he was one of the founders of the Kadet party and advocated for a constitutional democracy for Russia. Married to the author Rashel Khin, he fathered three children with the violinist Lea Luboshutz, among them the opera impresario Boris Goldovsky.
Go to Profile#3619
Jacobus Balduinus
1175 - 1235 (60 years)
Jacobus Balduinus was an Italian jurist. Balduinus was born in Bologna probably about 1175, and is reputed to have been of a noble family. He was a pupil of Azo, and the master of Odofredus, of the canonist Hostiensis , and of Jacobus de Ravanis , who taught at Orléans. His great fame as a professor of civil law at the University of Bologna caused Balduinus to be elected podestà of the city of Genoa, where he was entrusted with the reforms of the law of the Genoese Republic. He died at Bologna in 1235, and has left behind him some treatises on procedure.
Go to Profile#3620
George Clinton Jr.
1771 - 1809 (38 years)
George Clinton Jr. was an American politician and lawyer who served as a U.S. representative from New York from 1805 to 1809. Early life He was born in New York City on June 6, 1771, the son of Mary De Witt and James Clinton, a brevet major general in the American Revolutionary War. He was the brother of DeWitt Clinton , the 6th governor of New York, and half-brother of James Graham Clinton, also a U.S. Representative.
Go to Profile#3621
Arthur A. Leeper
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Arthur A. Leeper was an American lawyer and politician. Leeper was born near Chandlerville, Cass County, Illinois. He went to the public schools. Lepper went to Eureka College and to University of Iowa College of Law. He lived in Virginia, Illinois with his wife and family. Leeper served as state's attorney for Cass County. He served in the Illinois Senate from 1889 to 1901 and was a Democrat. He died at his daughter's home in Clinton, Illinois.
Go to Profile#3622
Boëtius Epo
1529 - 1599 (70 years)
Boetius Epo was a lawyer and scholar from the Low Countries. He was born at Reduzum, in Friesland, in 1529. He studied at Cologne and Leuven, and made such rapid progress in the acquisition of the learned languages, that at the age of twenty he gave public lectures on Homer. He afterwards taught, not only at Leuven but at Paris, jurisprudence, the belles-lettres, and theology, and afterwards went to Geneva with a view to inquire if the religious principles of John Calvin were worthy of the reputation they had gained. Not satisfied, however, with them, Boetius Epo returned to the Catholic Chur...
Go to Profile#3623
Freeman Ransom
1884 - 1947 (63 years)
Freeman Briley Ransom was an American lawyer, businessman and civic activist in Indianapolis, Indiana. From 1910 until his death he served as legal counsel to Madam C. J. Walker and the Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. Robert Brokenburr was his law partner.
Go to Profile#3624
Paul Cornell
1822 - 1904 (82 years)
Paul Cornell was an American lawyer and Chicago real estate speculator who founded the Hyde Park Township that included most of what are now known as the south and far southeast sides of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. He turned the south side Lake Michigan lakefront area, especially the Hyde Park community area and neighboring Kenwood and Woodlawn neighborhoods, into a resort community that had its heyday from the 1850s through the early 20th century. He was also an urban planner who paved the way for and preserved many of the parks that are now in the Chicago Park District.
Go to Profile#3625
Henning Jakob Henrik Lund
1875 - 1948 (73 years)
Henning Jakob Henrik Lund or Intel'eraq was a Greenlandic lyricist, painter, and pastor. He wrote the lyrics to "Nunarput utoqqarsuanngoravit," in the indigenous Greenlandic language, an Eskimo–Aleut language. The song was adopted as the national anthem of Greenland.
Go to Profile#3626
Thomas Greenwood
1790 - 1871 (81 years)
Thomas Greenwood was an English barrister, academic and historian. Life The second son of Thomas Greenwood, a London merchant, he was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1815 and M.A. in 1831. He entered Gray's Inn on 14 March 1809, and was called to the bar on 24 June 1817.
Go to Profile#3627
Edwin Borchard
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Edwin Montefiore Borchard was an American international legal scholar, jurist, and Sterling Professor at the Yale Law School. He was a leading advocate of innocence reform and compensation for victims of wrongful conviction as well as the use of declaratory judgments. His work in international law emphasized non-intervention and neutrality.
Go to Profile#3628
Weston J. Morrow
#3629
Charles Heidelberger
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Charles Heidelberger was a cancer researcher who developed and patented an anticancer drug called 5-Fluorouracil that remains widely used against cancers of the stomach, colon and breast. He was also director of basic research at the University of Southern California's Comprehensive Cancer Center. He received an American Cancer Society National Award in 1974. Heidelberger served on editorial boards of various scientific journals: Cancer Research, Molecular Pharmacology, Biochemical Pharmacology, the International Journal of Cancer, In Vitro, and the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. He served ...
Go to Profile#3630
Roger J. Traynor
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
Roger John Traynor was the 23rd Chief Justice of California and an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California from 1940 to 1964. Previously, he had served as a Deputy Attorney General of California under Earl Warren, and an Acting Dean and Professor of UC Berkeley School of Law. He is widely considered to be one of the most creative and influential judges and legal scholars of his time.
Go to Profile#3631
Jesse Bullowa
1879 - 1943 (64 years)
Jesse Godrey Moritz Bullowa was an American medical researcher, and an early proponent of controlled clinical trials. From 1928 until his death he was a clinical professor at New York University College of Medicine.
Go to Profile#3632
Edith Quimby
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Edith Smaw Quimby was an American medical researcher and physicist, best known as one of the founders of nuclear medicine. Her work involved developing diagnostic and therapeutic applications of X-rays. One of her main concerns was protecting both those handling the radioactive material and making sure that those being treated were given the lowest dose necessary.
Go to Profile#3633
Hans von Hentig
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Hans von Hentig was a German criminal psychologist and politician. He was the second son of lawyer Otto von Hentig .His older brother was later diplomat Werner Otto von Hentig. Otto von Hentig was one of the leading lawyers in Berlin. Hans von Hentig was instrumental in the setting up of a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. During the 1920s he was a prominent exponent of National Bolshevism. He emigrated to United States in 1935. Hans von Hentig worked for some time at Yale and other universities.
Go to Profile#3634
Alpheus T. Mason
1899 - 1989 (90 years)
Alpheus Thomas Mason was an American legal scholar and biographer. He wrote several biographies of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, including Louis Brandeis, Harlan F. Stone, and William Howard Taft.
Go to Profile#3635
Francis Bowes Sayre Sr.
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Francis Bowes Sayre Sr. was a professor at Harvard Law School, High Commissioner of the Philippines, and a son-in-law of President Woodrow Wilson. Biography He was born on April 30, 1885. He graduated from Williams College in 1909 and Harvard Law School in 1912. At the start of his career, Sayre worked for Wilfred Grenfell's medical mission in Newfoundland, and as an assistant prosecutor in the office of the New York County District Attorney .On November 25, 1913, Sayre married Jessie Woodrow Wilson , the middle daughter of President Woodrow Wilson, in a ceremony at the White House. In 1914 he began work as an assistant to the president of Williams College.
Go to Profile#3636
L. F. L. Oppenheim
1858 - 1919 (61 years)
Lassa Francis Lawrence Oppenheim was a German jurist. He is regarded by many as the father of the modern discipline of international law, especially the hard legal positivist school of thought. He inspired Joseph Raz and Prosper Weil.
Go to Profile#3637
Michael Barton Akehurst
1940 - 1989 (49 years)
Michael Barton Akehurst was an international lawyer. He was the author of the Modern Introduction to International Law which remains the most widely used student text in the field. Seven editions have been published, it has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese and it was updated after his death by Peter Malanczuk under the title 'Akehurst's Modern Introduction to International Law'.
Go to Profile#3638
Raphael Lemkin
1900 - 1959 (59 years)
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who is known for coining the term genocide and campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention. During the Second World War, he campaigned vigorously to raise international outrage against atrocities in Axis-occupied Europe. It was during this time that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policies against Jews and Poles.
Go to Profile#3639
Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld
1879 - 1918 (39 years)
Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld was an American jurist. He was the author of the seminal Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays . During his brief life, he published only a handful of law review articles. After his death the material forming the basis of Fundamental Legal Conceptions was derived from two articles first published in the Yale Law Journal and that had been partially revised in anticipation of publication in longer form. Editorial work was undertaken to complete the revisions and the book was published with the inclusion of the manuscript n...
Go to Profile#3640
Gertrude Smith
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Gertrude Elizabeth Smith was the Edwin Olson Professor of Greek at the University of Chicago. She is known for her work on Greek law and her longstanding involvement in and support of the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She was the first woman to be president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and is currently the only woman to have been president of CAMWS and the American Philological Association.
Go to Profile#3641
Friedrich Litten
1873 - 1940 (67 years)
Friedrich Julius Litten was a German jurist and a university college teacher. His father was Joseph Litten, the president of the Jewish community in Königsberg from 1899 to 1906. He married Irmgard Litten from an established Lutheran family in Swabia, the daughter of Albert Wüst, a professor at the University of Halle-Wittenberg.
Go to Profile#3642
Harry Augustus Garfield
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Harry Augustus "Hal" Garfield was an American lawyer, academic, and public official. He was president of Williams College and supervised the United States Fuel Administration during World War I. He was a son of President James A. Garfield.
Go to Profile#3643
Ottmar Bühler
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Ottmar Bühler was a German Law professor specialising in tax law. Life Ottmar Bühler was born in Zürich. His father was a professor of Forestry at Tübingen. Despite his being born in Switzerland, Bühler's father had been born in Württemberg, and it was in Tübingen that he grew up and attended school . His subsequent period as a student of Jurisprudence took in Tübingen, Munich and Berlin. He undertook his "Referendariat" between 1908 and 1911, and then received his doctorate in 1911 for work on the nineteenth century evolution of civil law jurisdiction with regard to the administration of the law in Württemberg.
Go to Profile#3644
Walter Schiff
1866 - 1950 (84 years)
#3645
Harry Lawson
1897 - 1983 (86 years)
Frederick Henry Lawson, FBA , published as F. H. Lawson, was a British legal scholar. He was Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford from 1948 to 1964. Biography Lawson was born in Leeds, the son of a merchant. He was educated at Leeds Grammar School and The Queen's College, Oxford, where he was Hastings Exhibitioner in Classics. From 1916 to 1918 he served in an anti-aircraft regiment. After the war, he read Modern History instead, taking a First in 1921. The following year he took another First in Jurisprudence, and was called to the bar by Gray's Inn in 1923.
Go to Profile#3646
Underhill Moore
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
William Underhill Moore was an American legal scholar and Sterling Professor of Law at the Yale Law School , having previously taught at Columbia. His principal teaching fields were commercial bank credit and business organizations, Moore was considered one of the intellectual leaders of the Legal Realism movement at Yale and an early user of social scientific methods in legal research.
Go to Profile#3647
Pedro Lombardía
1930 - 1986 (56 years)
Pedro Lombardía was a Spanish canonist and pioneer of the Study of State Ecclesiastical Law in Spain. He held the chairs of Canon Law and State Ecclesiastical Law at the University of Navarra and the Complutense University of Madrid.
Go to Profile#3648
Sibylle Bolla-Kotek
1913 - 1969 (56 years)
Sibylle von Bolla-Kotek was an Austrian scholar of legal history and the first female professor in a legal faculty in Austria. Life Sibylle von Bolla was born in Bratislava in 1913, the daughter of the Hungarian Oberst Gideon von Bolla and his wife Margarethe. The family moved to Teplice in the new state of Czechoslovakia in 1923, where von Bolla attended a humanistic Gymnasium. Her father died in 1929 and her family was supported thereafter by her father's army colleague Theodor Körner.
Go to Profile#3649
Otfried Nippold
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Otfried Nippold was a German–Swiss jurist, pacifist and internationalist. He was also an academic and a prolific author. Nippold was born in Wiesbaden, Duchy of Nassau, as the son of Professor Friedrich Nippold of the University of Bern and the University of Jena. He attended gymnasium in Burgdorf and in Bern and studied law at the University of Bern, University of Halle, University of Tübingen and at the University of Jena. At the Jena, he earned his doctorate in 1886.
Go to Profile#3650
Garfield Bromley Oxnam
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
Garfield Bromley Oxnam was a social reformer and American Bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, elected in 1936. Early life Garfield Bromley Oxnam was born in Los Angeles on August 14, 1891. His father was a mining engineer and instilled in his son a conservative theology. Oxnam embraced these beliefs in his youth, even describing socialism as "the biggest idiocy ever presented to the public." However, in his early 20s Oxnam gravitated towards Dana W. Bartlett and the movements of the Social Gospel.
Go to Profile