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List of the most influential people in Law,

#3601

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.

#3602

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.

#3603

Harry Augustus Garfield

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.

#3604

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.

#3605

Walter Schiff

1866 - 1950 (84 years)

#3606

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.

#3607

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.

#3608

Pedro Lombardía

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.

#3609

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.

#3610

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.

#3611

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.

#3612

Otto Brusiin

1906 - 1973 (67 years)

Otto Brusiin was a leading Finnish teacher of law. He taught at Helsinki from 1949 on before he was made assistant professor at Helsinki in 1955 and professor at Turku in 1961. Recorded to have been a stirring teacher, Brusiin was also widely connected abroad. In 1957, he was made first vice president of the International Association of Legal and Social Philosophy.

#3613

Ernst Rudolf Huber

1903 - 1990 (87 years)

Ernst Rudolf Huber was a German jurist, noted as a constitutional historian and for his attempts to provide a legal underpinning for the Nazi regime. Life and work Huber studied law in Bonn under Carl Schmitt. He received a PhD in 1926 for a work on state church law, and his habilitation in 1931 for a work on economic administrative law, which he was instrumental in establishing as a field of study. In 1933, he was called to teach in Kiel, and subsequently also taught law in Leipzig after 1937 and in Strasbourg from 1941 to 1944.

#3614

François Gény

1861 - 1959 (98 years)

François Gény was a French jurist and professor of law at the University of Nancy, who introduced the notion of "free scientific research" to the interpretation of positive law. His advocacy of judicial discretion in the interpretation of statutory law had an important influence across Europe. Gény also emphasized that judges should take into account social and economic factors when deciding cases.

#3615

Afonso Pena Júnior

1879 - 1968 (89 years)

#3616

Jean Spiropoulos

1896 - 1972 (76 years)

Jean Spiropoulos, or originally Ioannis Georgiou Spyropoulos was a Greek expert in international law. He studied law at the Universities of Zürich and Leipzig. From 1928 onward, he taught Public International law at the Law School of the Aristotle University and several universities in Greece. From 1949 to 1957, he served as member of the International Law Commission and from 1958 to 1967, he served as judge at the International Court of Justice.

#3617

William A. Robson

1895 - 1980 (85 years)

William Alexander Robson was a British academic who was an early and influential scholar of public administration while serving as a lecturer and professor at the London School of Economics. Upon his death, The Guardian wrote that Robson was an "internationally renowned authority on public administration". Indeed, Robson played a key role in establishing public administration as an academic subject.

#3618

William Lloyd Prosser

1898 - 1972 (74 years)

William Lloyd Prosser was the Dean of the School of Law at UC Berkeley from 1948 to 1961. Prosser authored several editions of Prosser on Torts, universally recognized as the leading work on the subject of tort law for a generation. It is still widely used today, now known as Prosser and Keeton on Torts, 5th edition. Furthermore, in the 1950s, Dean Prosser became Reporter for the Second Restatement of Torts.

#3619

Ludwig Feuchtwanger

1885 - 1947 (62 years)

Ludwig Feuchtwanger was a German lawyer, lecturer and author. Life Feuchtwanger's ancestors originated from the Middle Franconian city of Feuchtwangen which, following a pogrom in 1555, expelled all its resident Jews. Some of the expellees subsequently settled in Fürth where they were called the Feuchtwangers, meaning those from Feuchtwangen. Feuchtwanger's grandfather Elkan moved to Munich in the middle of 19th century.

#3620

George Wirgman Hemming

1821 - 1905 (84 years)

George Wirgman Hemming, KC was an English law reporter and barrister. Life Born on 19 August 1821, he was the second son of Henry Keene Hemming of Grays, Essex, by his wife Sophia, daughter of Gabriel Wirgman of London. Educated at Clapham grammar school, he went to St John's College, Cambridge, where in 1844, he was senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman and was elected to a fellowship.

#3621

Jerzy Wróblewski

1926 - 1990 (64 years)

Jerzy Wróblewski Biography Wróblewski graduated at the Jagiellonian University in 1947 with master's degree in law and completed postgraduate studies in philosophy. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1949, he moved to the University of Łódź in 1951, where he was appointed head of chair of the theory of state and law. He achieved habilitation in 1970. He remained at Łódź till his death, where he performed a number of functions: pro-dean of the Faculty of Law , dean of the Faculty of Law , pro-rector , and rector .

#3622

Ludwig Wahrmund

1860 - 1932 (72 years)

Ludwig Wahrmund was an Austrian professor of Canon Law at the University of Innsbruck. Ludwig was the son of Adolf Wahrmund, a noted anti-semite. However, Ludwig rose to prominence from a lecture he gave on 18 January 1908 in Innsbruck Town Hall entitled Catholic Weltanschauung and Free Science. The lecture was repeated in Salzburg and published as a pamphlet. Ludwig's criticism of the Catholic Church and their attempt to control education gave rise to the "Wahrmund Affair", which led to his removal from his professorial chair in Innsbruck.

#3623

Max Ascoli

1898 - 1978 (80 years)

Max Ascoli was a Jewish Italian-American professor of political philosophy and law at the New School for Social Research, United States of America. Career Ascoli's career started in Italy and continued in the United States.

#3624

Félix Somló

1873 - 1920 (47 years)

Bódog Somló was a Hungarian legal scholar of Jewish heritage. Along with Hans Kelsen and Georg Jellinek, he belonged to the range of Austrian Legal Positivists. He was a professor at the University of Kolozsvár. In 1920, he committed suicide out of disgust at the cession of his university to the Romanian state, an action that had taken place the previous year.

#3625

Cicero

106 BC - 43 BC (63 years)

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, writer and Academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics. He is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists and the innovator of what became known as "Ciceronian rhetoric". Cicero was educated in Rome and in Greece. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and served as consul in 63 BC.

#3626

Hans Kelsen

1881 - 1973 (92 years)

Hans Kelsen was an Austrian jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. He was the author of the 1920 Austrian Constitution, which with amendments is still in operation. Due to the rise of totalitarianism in Austria , Kelsen left for Germany in 1930 but was forced out of his university post after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry. That year he left for Geneva and in 1940 he moved to the United States. In 1934, Roscoe Pound lauded Kelsen as "undoubtedly the leading jurist of the time". While in Vienna, Kelsen met Sigmund Freud and his circle, and wrote ...

#3627

Edward Coke

1552 - 1634 (82 years)

Sir Edward Coke was an English barrister, judge, and politician. He is often considered the greatest jurist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Born into an upper-class family, Coke was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, before leaving to study at the Inner Temple, where he was called to the Bar on 20 April 1578. As a barrister, he took part in several notable cases, including Slade's Case, before earning enough political favour to be elected to Parliament, where he served first as Solicitor General and then as Speaker of the House of Commons. Following a promotion to Attorney General ...

#3628

Jeremy Bentham

1749 - 1832 (83 years)

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts.

#3629

Hugo Grotius

1583 - 1645 (62 years)

Hugo Grotius , also known as Huig de Groot and Hugo de Groot , was a Dutch humanist, diplomat, lawyer, theologian, jurist, statesman, poet and playwright. A teenage prodigy, he was born in Delft and studied at Leiden University. He was imprisoned in Loevestein Castle for his involvement in the controversies over religious policy of the Dutch Republic, but escaped hidden in a chest of books that was transported to Gorinchem. Grotius wrote most of his major works in exile in France.

#3630

Carl Schmitt

1888 - 1985 (97 years)

Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. An authoritarian conservative theorist, he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism. His work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism.

#3631

William Blackstone

William Blackstone

1723 - 1780 (57 years)

Sir William Blackstone was an English jurist, justice and Tory politician most noted for his Commentaries on the Laws of England, which became the best-known description of the doctrines of the English common law. Born into a middle-class family in London, Blackstone was educated at Charterhouse School before matriculating at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1738. After switching to and completing a Bachelor of Civil Law degree, he was made a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, on 2 November 1743, admitted to Middle Temple, and called to the Bar there in 1746. Following a slow start to his caree...

#3632

John Austin

1790 - 1859 (69 years)

John Austin was an English legal theorist who posthumously influenced British and American law with an analytical approach to jurisprudence and a theory of legal positivism. Austin opposed traditional approaches of "natural law", arguing against any need for connections between law and morality. Human legal systems, he claimed, can and should be studied in an empirical, value-free way.

#3633

Malik ibn Anas

711 - 795 (84 years)

Malik ibn Anas , whose full name is Mālik bin Anas bin Mālik bin Abī ʿĀmir bin ʿAmr bin Al-Ḥārith bin Ghaymān bin Khuthayn bin ʿAmr bin Al-Ḥārith al-Aṣbaḥī al-Ḥumyarī al-Madanī , reverently known as al-Imām Mālik by Sunni Muslims, was a Muslim jurist, theologian, and hadith traditionist. Born in the city of Medina, Malik rose to become the premier scholar of prophetic traditions in his day, which he sought to apply to "the whole legal life" in order to create a systematic method of Muslim jurisprudence which would only further expand with the passage of time. Referred to as the "Imam of Medi...

#3634

Abu Hanifa

699 - 767 (68 years)

Nuʿmān ibn Thābit ibn Zūṭā ibn Marzubān , commonly known by his kunya Abū Ḥanīfa , or reverently as Imam Abū Ḥanīfa by Sunni Muslims, was a Sunni Muslim theologian and jurist who became the eponymous founder of the Hanafi school of Sunni jurisprudence, which has remained the most widely practised school of law in the Sunni tradition. The school of thought predominates in Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran , Turkey, the Balkans, Russia, Circassia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Muslims in India, and some parts of the Arab world. He is also widely called al-Imām al-Aʿẓam and Sirāj al-Aʾimma by Sunni Musl...

#3635

Thomas More

1478 - 1535 (57 years)

Sir Thomas More PC , venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He also served Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to May 1532. He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, which describes the political system of an imaginary island state.

#3636

Henry Clay

1777 - 1852 (75 years)

Henry Clay Sr. was an American lawyer and statesman who represented Kentucky in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He was the seventh House speaker as well as the ninth secretary of state. He unsuccessfully ran for president in the 1824, 1832, and 1844 elections. He helped found both the National Republican Party and the Whig Party. For his role in defusing sectional crises, he earned the appellation of the "Great Compromiser" and was part of the "Great Triumvirate" of Congressmen alongside fellow Whigs Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.

#3637

Friedrich Carl von Savigny

Friedrich Carl von Savigny

1779 - 1861 (82 years)

Friedrich Carl von Savigny was a German jurist and historian. Early life and education Savigny was born at Frankfurt am Main, of a family recorded in the history of Lorraine, deriving its name from the castle of Savigny near Charmes in the valley of the Moselle. Left as orphan at the age of 13, Savigny was brought up by a guardian until, in 1795, he entered the University of Marburg, where, though in poor health, he studied under Professors Anton Bauer and Philipp Friedrich Weiss, the former a pioneer in the reform of the German criminal law, the latter distinguished for his knowledge of medieval jurisprudence.

#3638

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1646 - 1716 (70 years)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his knowledge and skills in different fields and because such people became less common during the Industrial Revolution and spread of specialized labor after his lifetime. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physic...

#3639

Felix Frankfurter

Felix Frankfurter

1882 - 1965 (83 years)

Felix Frankfurter was an Austrian-born American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 until 1962, during which period he was a noted advocate of judicial restraint in its judgements.

#3640

B. R. Ambedkar

1891 - 1956 (65 years)

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer and political leader who headed the committee drafting the Constitution of India from the Constituent Assembly debates, served as Law and Justice minister in the first cabinet of Jawaharlal Nehru, and inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement after renouncing Hinduism.

#3641

Roscoe Pound

1870 - 1964 (94 years)

Nathan Roscoe Pound was an American legal scholar and educator. He served as dean of the University of Nebraska College of Law from 1903 to 1911 and was dean of Harvard Law School from 1916 to 1936. He was a member of Northwestern University, the University of Chicago Law School and the faculty at UCLA School of Law in the school's early years, from 1949 to 1952. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Pound as one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century.

#3642

Ahmad ibn Hanbal

Ahmad ibn Hanbal

780 - 855 (75 years)

Ahmad ibn Hanbal al-Dhuhli , was a Muslim jurist, theologian, ascetic, hadith traditionist, and founder of the Hanbali school of Sunni jurisprudence — one of the four major orthodox legal schools of Sunni Islam. The most highly influential and active scholar during his lifetime, Ibn Hanbal went on to become "one of the most venerated" intellectual figures in Islamic history, who has had a "profound influence affecting almost every area of" the traditionalist perspective within Sunni Islam. One of the foremost classical proponents of relying on scriptural sources as the basis for Sunni Islamic ...

#3643

Ibn Taymiyyah

1263 - 1328 (65 years)

#3644

Louis Brandeis

1856 - 1941 (85 years)

Louis Dembitz Brandeis was an American lawyer who served as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939. Starting in 1890, he helped develop the "right to privacy" concept by writing a Harvard Law Review article of that title, and was thereby credited by legal scholar Roscoe Pound as having accomplished what was seen "nothing less than adding a chapter to our law." He was a leading figure in the antitrust movement at the turn of the century, particularly in his resistance to the monopolization of the New England railroad and advice to Woodrow Wilson as a candidate.

#3645

Ulpian

170 - 228 (58 years)

Ulpian was a Roman jurist born in Tyre . He moved to Rome and rose to become considered one of the great legal authorities of his time. He was one of the five jurists upon whom decisions were to be based according to the Law of Citations of Valentinian III, and supplied the Justinian Digest about a third of its contents.

#3646

Learned Hand

1872 - 1961 (89 years)

Billings Learned Hand was an American jurist, lawyer, and judicial philosopher. He served as a federal trial judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York from 1909 to 1924 and as a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1924 to 1951.

#3647

Rudolf von Jhering

Rudolf von Jhering

1818 - 1892 (74 years)

Caspar Rudolph Ritter von Jhering was a German jurist. He is best known for his 1872 book Der Kampf ums Recht , as a legal scholar, and as the founder of a modern sociological and historical school of law. His ideas were important to the subsequent development of the "jurisprudence of interests" in Germany.

#3648

Roland Freisler

1893 - 1945 (52 years)

Karl Roland Freisler was a German jurist, judge and politician who served as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1934 to 1942 and as President of the People's Court from 1942 to 1945.

#3649

Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow

1857 - 1938 (81 years)

Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer who became famous in the early 20th century for his involvement in the Leopold and Loeb murder trial and the Scopes trial. He was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform. Darrow was also well known as a public speaker, debater, and miscellaneous writer. He is considered by some legal analysts and lawyers to be the greatest lawyer of the 20th century. He was also posthumously inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame.

#3650

Lon L. Fuller

1902 - 1978 (76 years)

Lon Luvois Fuller was an American legal philosopher best known as a proponent of a secular and procedural form of natural law theory. Fuller was a professor of law at Harvard Law School for many years, and is noted in American law for his contributions to both jurisprudence and the law of contracts. His debate in 1958 with the prominent British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart in the Harvard Law Review was important in framing the modern conflict between legal positivism and natural law theory. In his widely discussed 1964 book The Morality of Law, Fuller argues that all systems of law contain an "internal morality" that imposes on individuals a presumptive obligation of obedience.

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