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
Walton Hale Hamilton
1881 - 1958 (77 years)
Walton Hale Hamilton was an American law professor who taught at Yale Law School . In 1919, Hamilton coined the term "institutional economics". Life and work Born in Tennessee, Hamilton received a B.A. degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1907 and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1913. He married Lucile Elizabeth Rhodes in 1909; they had three children. The couple later divorced and he married Irene Till, on July 20, 1937, adopting her son by a previous marriage later having two children. He died in Washington, D.C., on October 27, 1958.
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Arthur Lehman Goodhart
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Arthur Lehman Goodhart was an American-born academic jurist and lawyer; he was Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, 1931–51, when he was also a Fellow of University College, Oxford. He was the first American to be the Master of an Oxford college, and was a significant benefactor to the college.
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Henry Angus
1891 - 1991 (100 years)
Henry Forbes Angus was a Canadian lawyer and academic. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, he received a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University in 1911. He received a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Civil Law from Oxford University in 1914. He was awarded the Vinerian Scholarship. He fought in India during World War I. After the war, he received a Master of Arts from Oxford University. Returning to British Columbia, he was called to the Bar.
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Zechariah Chafee
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Zechariah Chafee Jr. was an American judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate, described as "possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century" by Richard Primus. Chafee's avid defense of freedom of speech led to Senator Joseph McCarthy calling him "dangerous" to America.
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Frederick Sherwood Dunn
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
Frederick Sherwood Dunn was an American scholar of international law and international relations. After working as a legal officer at the U.S. Department of State, he went into academia and taught at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and Princeton University, publishing several books during his career. He served as a founder and a director of both Yale's Institute of International Studies and the Center of International Studies at Princeton. He founded the journal World Politics and was chairman of its editorial board until 1961.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Walter Schiff
1866 - 1950 (84 years)
#3666
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Afonso Pena Júnior
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
#3676
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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