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.
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List of the most influential people in Law,
#3651
William Welwod
1578 - 1622 (44 years)
William Welwod was a Scottish jurist who was the first to formulate the laws of the sea in an insular Germanic language. He was a professor of civil law at the University of St Andrews until 1611, when he resigned his chair and moved to England.
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Fred Rodell
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Fred Rodell was an American law professor most famous for his critiques of the U.S. legal profession. A professor at Yale Law School for more than forty years, Rodell was described in 1980 as the "bad boy of American legal academia" by Charles Alan Wright.
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Vespasian Pella
1897 - 1952 (55 years)
Vespasian V. Pella was a Romanian international law expert. Legal career and opinions During the interwar period, he promoted the notion of international criminal proceedings against heads of state found guilty of crimes against humanity by the establishment of a special international tribunal for that purpose. In 1938 he served as President of the Committee on Legal Questions of the League of Nations.
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Ernst Levy
1881 - 1968 (87 years)
Ernst Levy was a German American legal scholar and historian of law. He was a Professor of Roman Law at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Heidelberg . Being Jewish, he was forced to retire in 1935, and decided to emigrate from Nazi Germany to the United States. At the University of Washington, he was a Professor of Law and History from 1937 to 1952.
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Anatoly Koni
1844 - 1927 (83 years)
Anatoly Fedorovich Koni was a Russian jurist, judge, politician and writer. He was the most politically influential jurist of the late Russian Empire and a leading Russian liberal. Anatoly Koni was the son of the noted dramatist Fyodor Koni. Among the public offices Koni held was prosecutor at the district court of Kharkov since 1867, vice director of the Ministry of Justice since 1875, presiding judge of the district court of Saint Petersburg since 1878, and member of the State Council since 1907. He taught at the Imperial School of Law and at the University of Saint Petersburg.
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Yap Thiam Hien
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
John Yap Thiam Hien was an Indonesian human rights lawyer. Life Born in Kutaraja, Aceh, Dutch East Indies, his father was Yap Sin Eng and his mother was Hwan Tjing Nio. Yap's family, living in genteel but reduced circumstances, was part of the Cabang Atas or the local Chinese gentry; through his father, Yap was a great-grandson of Yap A Sin, Luitenant der Chinezen of Kutaraja from 1901 until 1922, a high-ranking position in the colonial civil bureaucracy.
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James Muirhead
1831 - 1889 (58 years)
James Muirhead was a 19th century Scottish scholar and Professor of Civil Law at Edinburgh University. He gives his name to the Muirhead Prize in Civil Law at the University. Life James Muirhead was born on at 7 Heriot Row, Edinburgh the eldest of five sons of Claud Muirhead, a printer and publisher of the Edinburgh Advertiser, and his wife Mary Watson. The family also owned the huge Gogar Park estate just west of the city .
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Paul Laymann
1574 - 1635 (61 years)
Paul Laymann was an Austrian Jesuit and important moralist. Laymann was born at Arzl, near Innsbruck. After studying jurisprudence at Ingolstadt, he entered the Society of Jesus there in 1594, was ordained priest in 1603, taught philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt from 1603-9, moral theology at the Jesuit house in Munich from 1609–25, and Canon law at the University of Dillingen from 1625-32. He died of the plague at Konstanz.
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Ferdinand Regelsberger
1831 - 1911 (80 years)
Ferdinand Friedrich Waldemar Regelsberger was a German jurist. Regelsberger was born in Gunzenhausen. He studied law at the University of Erlangen and at the University of Zurich. He was in 1868 President of the University of Zurich. Regelsberger died in Göttingen.
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Huger Jervey
1878 - 1949 (71 years)
Huger W. Jervey was an American lawyer, professor, and dean of Columbia Law School. Jervey assumed the position as dean at Columbia Law after Harlan F. Stone in 1924. He resigned from the position in 1928. He was a professor of law at Columbia from 1923 to 1949, and also became the head of Columbia's Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law in 1931.
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James Monroe Gregory
1849 - 1915 (66 years)
James Monroe Gregory was a Professor of Latin and Dean at Howard University. During the American Civil War, he worked in Cleveland for the education and aid of escaped slaves. He initially attended Oberlin College. He transferred to Howard and was the valedictorian of Howard's first graduating class in 1872. He then became a member of faculty, where he served until the late 1880s. During that time he was active in civil rights, particularly related to the education of African American children. He fought to desegregate Washington D.C. schools in the early 1880s and participated in the Colored Conventions Movement and was a delegate to the 1892 Republican National Convention.
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Lucy Maud Montgomery
1874 - 1942 (68 years)
Lucy Maud Montgomery , published as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a collection of novels, essays, short stories, and poetry beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. She published 20 novels as well as 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays. Anne of Green Gables was an immediate success; the title character, orphan Anne Shirley, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. Most of the novels were set on Prince Edward Island, and those locations within Canada's smallest province became a literary landmark and popular tourist site – namely Green Gables farm, the genesis of Prince Edward Island National Park.
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Maximilian Hacman
1877 - 1961 (84 years)
Maximilian Hacman was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian jurist. Biography Early life and Bukovina union role Born in Oprișeni, in Austrian-ruled Bukovina, his uncle was Romanian Orthodox metropolitan Eugenie Hacman, while his father Vasile served as the village priest from 1857 to 1879. After attending primary school in Oprișeni, he went to high school in Czernowitz . He then enrolled in Czernowitz University, studying at the law faculty and becoming a jurist specialized in commercial and trade law. He took his doctorate in 1904 and, esteemed by his professors, was sent to complete his studi...
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A. D. Gardner
1884 - 1977 (93 years)
Arthur Duncan Gardner, FRCP, FRCS was a British physician and scientist known for his contributions to the development of penicillin and his role as the Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford from 1948 to 1954.
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Andreas von Tuhr
1864 - 1925 (61 years)
Andreas von Tuhr was a Russian-German jurist, whose work on the fundamental conceptions of private law within the civilian tradition has been of lasting significance. Von Tuhr was born in St Petersburg to a family of German ethnicity on 14 February 1864. When he was still a child, they moved to Germany. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Leipzig and Strasbourg and was much influenced by Bernhard Windscheid and Ernst Bekker. He gained his doctorate summa cum laude in 1885 at Heidelberg where his Der Nothstand im Civilrecht was published in 1888. In 1891 he was appointed as lecturer at the University of Basel, and was promoted to full professor in 1893.
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John Shank More
1784 - 1861 (77 years)
John Shank More LL.D FRSE RSA was the Chair of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh which he held from 1843 to 1861. He was involved in the anti-slavery movement and was vice-president of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts.
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Clara Bewick Colby
1846 - 1916 (70 years)
Clara Dorothy Bewick Colby was a British-American lecturer, newspaper publisher and correspondent, women's rights activist, and suffragist leader. Born in England, she immigrated to the US, where she attended university and married the former American Civil War general, later Assistant United States Attorney General, Leonard Wright Colby. In 1883, she founded The Woman's Tribune in Beatrice, Nebraska, moving it three years later to Washington, D.C.; it became the country's leading women's suffrage publication. She was an advocate of peace and took part in the great peace conference at San Francisco during the exposition.
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Georg Arnold Heise
1778 - 1851 (73 years)
Georg Arnold Heise was an influential German legal scholar. He served as president of the Oberappellationsgericht der vier Freien Städte for more than three decades and is identified in certain academic circles as a leading representative of the 19th century German Historical School of Jurisprudence.
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George H. Burnett
1853 - 1927 (74 years)
George Henry Burnett was an American attorney and judge in the state of Oregon. He was the 21st chief justice of the Oregon Supreme Court serving twice as chief first in 1921 to 1923, and then in 1927 when he died in office. Overall he served on Oregon’s highest court from 1911 until 1927.
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Heinrich von Cocceji
1644 - 1719 (75 years)
Heinrich Freiherr von Cocceji was a German jurist from Bremen. He studied in Leiden and Oxford and was appointed professor of law at Heidelberg and in Utrecht . Named Geheimrat and marquis, he became ordinary professor in the faculty of law at Frankfurt , where he later died.
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John Swinton, Lord Swinton
1723 - 1799 (76 years)
The Hon John Swinton, Lord Swinton was a Scottish lawyer, judge and writer who rose to be a Senator of the College of Justice. Life He was the son of John Swinton of Swinton House in Berwickshire, advocate, and his wife Mary Semple, daughter of Rev Samuel Semple, minister of Liberton.
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Richard Reeve Baxter
1921 - 1980 (59 years)
Richard Reeve Baxter was a widely published American jurist and from 1950 until his death the preeminent figure on the law of war. Baxter served as a judge on the International Court of Justice , as a professor of law at Harvard University and as an enlisted man and officer in the U.S. Army . He is noted for consistently favoring moves that enhanced the protections afforded to those injured or threatened by armed conflict. Baxter authored the 1956 revision of the U.S. Army Manual on the Law of Land Warfare and was a leading representative of the U.S. at the Geneva conferences that concluded the Protocols to the Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War.
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Konstantin Katsarov
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Konstantin Ivanov Katsarov was a Bulgarian lawyer, professor of commercial law and international law at Sofia University. Encyclopedist, geopolitician and theorist of nationalization. In 1953 he was sentenced in Soviet Bulgaria to 15 years in prison for espionage. A rehabilitator from the Supreme Court of Bulgaria, he left his homeland and lived in exile in Switzerland until his death.
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Nicholas St. John Green
1830 - 1876 (46 years)
Nicholas St. John Green was an American philosopher and lawyer, one of the members of The Metaphysical Club. Green is known for his contributions in the field of law as well as his involvement in the formation of pragmatism. He has been named as the “grandfather of pragmatism” by Charles Peirce.
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Otto Eger
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Otto Eger was a German jurist and legal historian. As a professor at the University of Giessen , during the first half of the twentieth century, he was an influential teacher of several generations of legal scholars. He served terms as University Rector at both institutions. A committed nationalist, he backed national socialism which, in his judgement, opened up opportunities for revanchists who still hoped to find ways to undo the destruction of the Bismarckian German state in 1918/1919. More than six decades after his death, Otto Eger remained a controversial figure due to his engagement wi...
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Eduardo De Filippo
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Eduardo De Filippo , also known simply as Eduardo, was an Italian actor, director, screenwriter and playwright, best known for his Neapolitan works Filumena Marturano and Napoli Milionaria. Considered one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century, De Filippo was the author of many theatrical dramas staged and directed by himself first and later awarded and played outside Italy. For his artistic merits and contributions to Italian culture, he was named senatore a vita by the President of the Italian Republic Sandro Pertini.
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Bertram Hopkinson
1874 - 1918 (44 years)
Bertram Hopkinson was a British patent lawyer and Professor of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics at Cambridge University. In this position he researched flames, explosions and metallurgy and became a pioneer designer of the internal combustion engine.
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Bredo Henrik von Munthe af Morgenstierne
1851 - 1930 (79 years)
Bredo Henrik von Munthe af Morgenstierne was a Norwegian jurist, Professor of Jurisprudence at The Royal Frederick University from 1887, and the university's rector 1912–1918. Personal life He was born in Christiania as the son of Vilhelm Ludvig Herman von Munthe af Morgenstierne and his wife Fredrikke Nicoline Wilhelmine N. Sibbern, and was a member of the Munthe af Morgenstierne family, which was ennobled in 1755 by the Dano-Norwegian king. His maternal grandfather was Valentin Christian Wilhelm Sibbern, his paternal grandfather was Bredo Henrik von Munthe af Morgenstierne, Sr., and through his aunt Augusta Julie Georgine he was the nephew of Prime Minister Frederik Stang.
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Roman Longchamps de Bérier
1883 - 1941 (58 years)
Roman Longchamps de Bérier was a Polish lawyer and university professor, one of the most notable specialists in civil law of his generation and the last rector of the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów. He was murdered in what became known as the Massacre of Lwów professors.
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John Huston Finley
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
John Huston Finley was Professor of Polities at Princeton University from 1900 to 1903, and President of the City College of New York from 1903 until 1913, when he was appointed President of the University of the State of New York and Commissioner of Education of the State of New York. A promenade along the western bank of the East River between 63rd Street and 125th Street in Manhattan was named the John Finley Walk in 1940 because he had often walked the perimeter of Manhattan.
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Asad ibn al-Furat
759 - 828 (69 years)
Asad Ibn Al-Furat was a Muslim jurist and theologian in Ifriqiya, who played an important role in the Arab conquest of Sicily. Biography His family, originally from Harran in Upper Mesopotamia, emigrated with him to Ifriqiya. Asad studied in Medina with Malik ibn Anas, the founder of the Malikite school, and in Kufa with a disciple of Abu Hanifa, the founder of the Hanafite tradition. He collected his views on religious law in the Asadiyya, which had great influence in Ifriqiya.
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Herbert Oskar Meyer
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
Herbert Oskar Meyer was a German jurist and historian.
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François Baudouin
1520 - 1573 (53 years)
François Baudouin , also called Balduinus, was a French jurist, Christian controversialist and historian. Among the most colourful of the noted French humanists, he was respected by his contemporaries as a statesman and jurist, even as they frowned upon his perceived inconstancy in matters of faith: he was noted as a Calvinist who converted to Catholicism.
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Reinhard Frank
1860 - 1934 (74 years)
Reinhard Frank was a German lawyer-academic specialising in criminal law and international public law. He was a prolific author of legal text books and became an influential law reformer. In 1920 Frank was appointed Rector of Munich University.
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Johann Rudolf Engau
1708 - 1755 (47 years)
Johann Rudolf Engau was a German jurist. Engau was born in Erfurt. He entered the University of Jena in 1726, and earned a doctorate of law from there in 1734. In 1738 he became extraordinary professor at Jena, and in 1740 became full professor as well as assessor for the magistrates' court .
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Emanuel Treu
1915 - 1976 (61 years)
Emanuel Treu was a leader of the Austrian Resistance during World War Two and an ambassador of the Republic of Austria in the post-war period. Youth Born in Vienna to a wealthy stamp manufacturer and his wife, Emanuel Treu studied law at the University of Vienna after graduating from high school in 1933 and doing his military service. He came from a family of strict opponents of national socialism, and was arrested after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich due to his refusal to participate in the establishment of the Hitler Youth as a scout leader. He was severely tortured at the H...
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Albert Levitt
1887 - 1968 (81 years)
Albert Levitt was an American judge, law professor, Unitarian minister, attorney and government official. He unsuccessfully ran many times for public office in Connecticut, California and New Hampshire, generally receiving only a small percentage of the vote. While a judge of the District Court of the Virgin Islands in 1935, he ordered that women there must be allowed to register and vote.
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Joseph T. Robinson
1872 - 1937 (65 years)
Joseph Taylor Robinson , also known as Joe T. Robinson, was an American politician from Arkansas. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented Arkansas in the United States Senate from 1913 to 1937, serving for four years as Senate Majority Leader and ten as Minority Leader. He previously served as the state's 23rd governor, and was also the Democratic vice presidential nominee in the 1928 presidential election.
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Ignaz von Sonnleithner
1770 - 1831 (61 years)
Ignaz Sonnleithner, from 1828 Ignaz Edler von Sonnleithner , was an Austrian jurist, writer and educator. He also founded the Society of Music Friends of the Austrian Imperial State in 1812. He was a close friend to Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert.
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André Weiss
1858 - 1928 (70 years)
Charles André Weiss was a French jurist. He was professor at the Universities of Dijon and Paris and served from 1922 until his death as judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice. Life André Weiss was born in Mulhouse in 1858 and completed a degree in law at the University of Paris in 1880. The following year he became a professor at the University of Dijon. In 1891 he moved to the Law School of the University of Paris. There he was from 1896 to 1908 a full professor of civil law, and from 1908 he held the chair for international law and private international law. From 1907 he also acted as legal advisor to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Karl Friedrich Walch
1734 - 1799 (65 years)
Karl Friedrich Walch was a German legal scholar. Biography Walch was a son of German theologian Johann Georg Walch. He devoted himself to the study of law, and became professor of law at the University of Jena in 1759. His most important works were Introductio in controversias juris civilis recentioris and Geschichte der in Deutschland geltenden Rechte .
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Frederik Peter Brandt
1825 - 1891 (66 years)
Frederik Peter Brandt was a Norwegian jurist, legal historian and professor at the Faculty of Law of the Royal Frederick University . Biography Frederik Peter Brandt was born at Åmli in Aust-Agder, Norway. He enrolled at Royal Frederick University in 1842, receiving his cand.jur. in 1846. He became a university research fellow in 1849. In 1851, he was awarded the Crown Prince's gold medal for his thesis regarding changes in Norwegian judicial institutions. He became an associate professor at the Faculty of Law in 1862 and professor in History of Law in 1866. He also served as Dean of t...
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Carl Georg Björling
1870 - 1934 (64 years)
Carl Georg Björling was a Swedish lawyer and professor. Life He was born on 16 September 1870 in Halmstad, Sweden, and was the son of Carl Fabian Björling and his wife Minna Agnes Cecilia von Schéele. He died on 14 March 1934.
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Joel Parker
1795 - 1875 (80 years)
Joel Parker was an American jurist from New Hampshire. Biography Joel Parker was born at Jaffrey, New Hampshire on January 25, 1795. He studied at Groton Academy, and later Dartmouth College, where he graduated in 1811.
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Robert L. Henry Jr.
1882 - Present (144 years)
Robert L. Henry Jr. was an American professor of law. Biography Born in Chicago, Illinois he was educated at the University of Chicago and as Rhodes Scholar in Oxford. He was also educated at Heidelberg, Germany, and Grenoble, France.
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Gottfried Mascov
1698 - 1760 (62 years)
Gottfried Mascov was a German jurist and university professor. Life Gottfried Mascov was born in Danzig. At that time, Danzig was a large semi-autonomous trading city on the Baltic coast of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The city at this time was multi-cultural: Mascov's family was prominent in the German speaking merchant community, his grandparents having fled to Danzig from the west during the Thirty Years' War. Gottfried Mascov's elder brother, remembered as a jurist and historian, was . The boys lost their parents before reaching adulthood, and responsibility for their upbringing fe...
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Herbert L. Packer
1925 - 1972 (47 years)
Herbert Leslie Packer was an American law professor and criminologist. His key work is the book The Limits of the Criminal Sanction , which proposed two models of the criminal justice system, the crime control model and the due process model. These models were extremely influential in criminology and criminal policy debates.
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Antonio Pigliaru
1922 - 1969 (47 years)
Antonio Pigliaru was a Sardinian jurist and philosopher. He was the most important Sardinian intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century, and one of the most vivid contemporary Italian thinkers. He engaged with manifold themes, but he devoted special attention to the interpretation of the socio-economic problems of interior areas of Sardinia, which he discussed according to his own ethical and political views.
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Félicien Cattier
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Félicien Cattier was a very prominent Belgian banker, financier and philanthropist. He was also professor of law at the Free University of Brussels. He was governor of the powerful trust, the Société Générale de Belgique and chairman of the Union minière du-Haut-Katanga amongst many other companies.
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Knut Robberstad
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Knut Ingebrikt Robberstad was a Norwegian jurist and philologist. He was born in Askøy, Hordaland, Norway. He was a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Oslo from 1945 to 1969. His juridical publications include Oreigningsvederlaget and Rettsutferd . A philologist who chaired Noregs Mållag from 1952 to 1957, he translated several documents from Old Norse, including Magnus Lagabøters bylov , a law dating from the reign of Magnus IV of Norway, and Gulatingslovi .
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