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,
#3701
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.
Go to Profile#3702
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...
Go to Profile#3703
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.
Go to Profile#3704
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.
Go to Profile#3705
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.
Go to Profile#3706
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 ...
Go to Profile#3707
Ibn Taymiyyah
1263 - 1328 (65 years)
#3708
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.
Go to Profile#3709
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.
Go to Profile#3710
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.
Go to Profile#3711
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.
Go to Profile#3712
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.
Go to Profile#3713
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.
Go to Profile#3714
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.
Go to Profile#3715
William H. Seward
1801 - 1872 (71 years)
William Henry Seward was an American politician who served as United States Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869, and earlier served as governor of New York and as a United States Senator. A determined opponent of the spread of slavery in the years leading up to the American Civil War, he was a prominent figure in the Republican Party in its formative years, and was praised for his work on behalf of the Union as Secretary of State during the Civil War. He also negotiated the treaty for the United States to purchase the Alaska Territory.
Go to Profile#3716
Ibn Hazm
994 - 1064 (70 years)
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm was an Andalusian Muslim polymath, historian, muhaddith, jurist, philosopher, and theologian, born in the Caliphate of Córdoba, present-day Spain. Described as one of the strictest hadith interpreters, Ibn Hazm was a leading proponent and codifier of the Zahiri school of Islamic thought and produced a reported 400 works, of which only 40 still survive. In all, his written works amounted to some 80,000 pages. Described as one of the fathers of comparative religion, the Encyclopaedia of Islam refers to him as having been one of the leading thinkers...
Go to Profile#3717
Christopher Columbus Langdell
1826 - 1906 (80 years)
Christopher Columbus Langdell was an American jurist and legal academic who was Dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895. Dean Langdell's legacy lies in the educational and administrative reforms he made to Harvard Law School, a task he was entrusted with by President Charles Eliot. Before Langdell's tenure the study of law was a rather technical pursuit in which students were simply told what the law is. Langdell applied the principles of pragmatism to the teaching of law as a result of which students were compelled to use their own reasoning powers to understand how the law might apply in a given case.
Go to Profile#3718
Dred Scott
1799 - 1858 (59 years)
Dred Scott was an enslaved African American man who, along with his wife, Harriet, unsuccessfully sued for the freedom of themselves and their two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, popularly known as the "Dred Scott decision". The Scotts claimed that they should be granted freedom because Dred had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years, where slavery was illegal, and laws in those jurisdictions said that slaveholders gave up their rights to slaves if they stayed for an extended period.
Go to Profile#3719
Friedrich Martens
1845 - 1909 (64 years)
Friedrich Fromhold Martens, or Friedrich Fromhold von Martens, was a diplomat and jurist in service of the Russian Empire who made important contributions to the science of international law. He represented Russia at the Hague Peace Conferences and helped to settle the first cases of international arbitration, notably the dispute between France and the United Kingdom over Newfoundland. As a scholar, he is probably best remembered today for having edited 15 volumes of Russian international treaties .
Go to Profile#3720
Gaius
120 - 180 (60 years)
Gaius was a Roman jurist. Little is known about his personal life, including his name . It is also difficult to ascertain the span of his life, but it is assumed he lived from AD 110 to at least AD 179, as he wrote on legislation passed within that time.
Go to Profile#3721
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab
1704 - 1792 (88 years)
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab ibn Sulayman al-Tamimi was a Sunni Muslim scholar, theologian, preacher, activist, religious leader, jurist, and reformer from Najd in central Arabia, considered as the eponymous founder of the so-called Wahhabi movement. His prominent students included his sons Ḥusayn, Abdullāh, ʿAlī, and Ibrāhīm, his grandson ʿAbdur-Raḥman ibn Ḥasan, his son-in-law ʿAbdul-ʿAzīz ibn Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd, Ḥamād ibn Nāṣir ibn Muʿammar, and Ḥusayn āl-Ghannām.
Go to Profile#3722
Karl Binding
1841 - 1920 (79 years)
Karl Ludwig Lorenz Binding was a German jurist known as a promoter of the theory of retributive justice. His influential book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens , written together with the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, was used by the Nazis to justify their T-4 Euthanasia Program.
Go to Profile#3723
Maximilien Robespierre
1758 - 1794 (36 years)
Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a French lawyer and statesman who became one of the most widely known, influential, and controversial figures of the French Revolution. As a member of the Estates-General, the Constituent Assembly, and the Jacobin Club, he campaigned for the right to vote of all men, including the passive citizens who were initially excluded. He also advocated the abolition of the death penalty and the Atlantic slave trade. In 1791, Robespierre was elected as "public accuser" and became an outspoken advocate for male citizens without a political voice, for...
Go to Profile#3724
Henry James Sumner Maine
1822 - 1888 (66 years)
Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, , was a British Whig comparative jurist and historian. He is famous for the thesis outlined in his book Ancient Law that law and society developed "from status to contract." According to the thesis, in the ancient world individuals were tightly bound by status dealing with a particular group while in the modern one, in which individuals are viewed as autonomous agents, they are free to make contracts and form associations with whomever they choose. Because of this thesis, Maine can be seen as one of the forefathers of modern legal anthropology, legal history and...
Go to Profile#3725
René David
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
René David was a French Professor of Law. His work has been published in eight different languages. He was, in the second half of the 20th century, one of the key representatives in the field of comparative law.
Go to Profile#3726
Solon
638 BC - 558 BC (80 years)
Solon was an Athenian statesman, constitutional lawmaker and poet. He is remembered particularly for his efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline in Archaic Athens. His reforms failed in the short term, yet Solon is credited with having laid the foundations for Athenian democracy. His constitutional reform also succeeded in overturning most laws established by Draco.
Go to Profile#3727
Gustav Hugo
1764 - 1844 (80 years)
Gustav Hugo was a German jurist. Biography Hugo was born at Lörrach in Baden. From the gymnasium at Karlsruhe he passed in 1782 to the University of Göttingen, where he studied law for three years. Having received the appointment of tutor to the prince of Anhalt-Dessau, he took his doctor's degree at the University of Halle in 1788. Recalled in the same year to Göttingen as extraordinary professor of law, he became a full professor in 1792. In the preface to his Beiträge zur civilistischen Bucherkenntniss der letzten vierzig Jahre he gives a sketch of the condition of the civil law teaching ...
Go to Profile#3728
Carl Hilty
1833 - 1909 (76 years)
Carl Andreas Hilty was a Swiss lawyer, professor of constitutional law, politician, philosopher, lay theologian and writer. Life Family background, education and early career Hilty was born in the small town of Werdenberg in the canton of St. Gallen in northeastern Switzerland. His father was the physician Johann Ulrich Hilty, who practised medicine in Chur, the capital of the eastern canton of the Grisons. His family had been based in Werdenberg for centuries and in 1835 he bought the crumbling Werdenberg Castle at an auction. Carl Hilty's mother Elisabeth hailed from Chur and was the daughter of a former regimental doctor of the French Army.
Go to Profile#3729
James Fitzjames Stephen
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1st Baronet, KCSI was an English lawyer, judge, writer, and philosopher. One of the most famous critics of John Stuart Mill, Stephen achieved prominence as a philosopher, law reformer, and writer.
Go to Profile#3730
Hersch Lauterpacht
1897 - 1960 (63 years)
Sir Hersch Lauterpacht was a British international lawyer, human rights activist, and judge at the International Court of Justice. Biography Hersch Lauterpacht was born on 16 August 1897 to a Jewish family in the small town of Żółkiew, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, near Lemberg , the capital of East Galicia. In 1911 his family moved to Lemberg. In 1915 he enrolled in the law school of the University of Lemberg; it is not clear whether he graduated. Lauterpacht himself later wrote that he had not been able to take the final examinations "because the university has been closed to Jews in Eastern Galicia".
Go to Profile#3731
Alf Ross
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Alf Niels Christian Ross was a Danish jurist, legal philosopher and judge of the European Court of Human Rights . He is best known as one of the leading figures of Scandinavian legal realism. His debate in 1959 with the prominent British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart – which began in the Cambridge Law Journal – was important in framing the modern conflict between legal positivism and legal realism.
Go to Profile#3732
George Wythe
1726 - 1806 (80 years)
George Wythe was an American academic, scholar and judge who was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. The first of the seven signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence from Virginia, Wythe served as one of Virginia's representatives to the Continental Congress and the Philadelphia Convention and served on a committee that established the convention's rules and procedures. He left the convention before signing the United States Constitution to tend to his dying wife. He was elected to the Virginia Ratifying Convention and helped ensure that his home state ratified the Constitution.
Go to Profile#3733
Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet
1845 - 1937 (92 years)
Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet PC, FBA was an English jurist best known for his History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, written with F.W. Maitland, and his lifelong correspondence with US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was a Cambridge Apostle.
Go to Profile#3734
John Chipman Gray
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
John Chipman Gray was an American scholar of property law and professor at Harvard Law School. He also founded the law firm Ropes & Gray, with law partner John Codman Ropes. He was half-brother to U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Horace Gray, and a grandson of merchant and politician William Gray.
Go to Profile#3735
Edmund Randolph
1753 - 1813 (60 years)
Edmund Jennings Randolph was a Founding Father of the United States, attorney, and the 7th Governor of Virginia. As a delegate from Virginia, he attended the Constitutional Convention and helped to create the national constitution while serving on its Committee of Detail. He was appointed the first United States Attorney General by George Washington and subsequently served as the second Secretary of State during the Washington administration.
Go to Profile#3736
Eduard Gans
1797 - 1839 (42 years)
Eduard Gans was a German jurist. Biography Gans was born in Berlin to prosperous Jewish parents. He studied law first at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin, then at Göttingen, and finally at Heidelberg, where he attended G. W. F. Hegel's lectures, and became thoroughly imbued with the principles of Hegel's philosophy. In 1820, after taking his doctor's degree, he returned to Berlin as a lecturer. In 1825 he converted to the Evangelical Church in Prussia, and the following year was appointed extraordinary, and in 1828 ordinary, professor in the Berlin University faculty of law. Before c...
Go to Profile#3737
Jean Bodin
1530 - 1596 (66 years)
Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law in Toulouse. Bodin lived during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and wrote against the background of religious conflict in France. He seemed to be a nominal Catholic throughout his life but was critical of papal authority over governments and there was evidence he may have converted to Protestantism during his time in Geneva. Known for his theory of sovereignty, he favoured the strong central control of a national monarchy as an antidote to factional strife.
Go to Profile#3738
Ferdinand Lassalle
1825 - 1864 (39 years)
Ferdinand Lassalle was a Prussian-German jurist, philosopher, socialist and politician who is best remembered as the initiator of the social-democratic movement in Germany. "Lassalle was the first man in Germany, the first in Europe, who succeeded in organising a party of socialist action", according to Élie Halévy. Or, as Rosa Luxemburg put it: "Lassalle managed to wrestle from history in two years of flaming agitation that needed decades to come about". As an agitator, he coined the terms night-watchman state and iron law of wages.
Go to Profile#3739
William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
1705 - 1793 (88 years)
William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, PC was a British barrister, politician and judge noted for his reform of English law. Born to Scottish nobility, he was a member of the Scottish Clan Murray, he was educated in Perth, Scotland, before moving to London at the age of 13 to take up a place at Westminster School. He was accepted into Christ Church, Oxford, in May 1723, and graduated four years later. Returning to London from Oxford, he was called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn on 23 November 1730, and quickly gained a reputation as an excellent barrister.
Go to Profile#3740
Radhabinod Pal
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Radhabinod Pal was an Indian jurist who was a member of the United Nations' International Law Commission from 1952 to 1966. He was one of three Asian judges appointed to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the "Tokyo Trials" of Japanese war crimes committed during the Second World War. Among all the judges of the tribunal, he was the only one who submitted a judgment which insisted all defendants were not guilty. The Yasukuni Shrine and the Kyoto Ryozen Gokoku Shrine have monuments specially dedicated to Pal.
Go to Profile#3741
Ernst Forsthoff
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Ernst Forsthoff was a German scholar of constitutional law and a leading theorist of administrative law. Life Forsthoff, the son of pastor , was called to teach law at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main 1933, at the University of Hamburg in 1935, at the Albertina in Königsberg in 1936 and at the University of Vienna in 1942. There he was forbidden to exercise his teaching post by the Gestapo until 1943, when he was called to the University of Heidelberg.
Go to Profile#3742
Wendell Phillips
1811 - 1884 (73 years)
Wendell Phillips was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney. According to George Lewis Ruffin, a Black attorney, Phillips was seen by many Blacks as "the one white American wholly color-blind and free from race prejudice". According to another Black attorney, Archibald Grimké, as an abolitionist leader he is ahead of William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner. From 1850 to 1865 he was the "preeminent figure" in American abolitionism.
Go to Profile#3743
John J. McCloy
1895 - 1989 (94 years)
John Jay McCloy was an American lawyer, diplomat, banker, and presidential advisor. He served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II under Henry Stimson, helping deal with issues such as German sabotage, political tensions in the North Africa Campaign, and opposing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, he served as the president of the World Bank, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Warren Commission, and a prominent United States adviser to all presidents from Franklin D.
Go to Profile#3744
Cesare Beccaria
1738 - 1794 (56 years)
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio was an Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher, economist and politician, who is widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment. He is well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments , which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology and the Classical School of criminology. Beccaria is considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice.
Go to Profile#3745
A. V. Dicey
1835 - 1922 (87 years)
Albert Venn Dicey, was a British Whig jurist and constitutional theorist. He is most widely known as the author of Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution . The principles it expounds are considered part of the uncodified British constitution. He became Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford, one of the first Professors of Law at the LSE Law School, and a leading constitutional scholar of his day. Dicey popularised the phrase "rule of law", although its use goes back to the 17th century.
Go to Profile#3746
Julius Paulus Prudentissimus
#3747
Jacob Grimm
1785 - 1863 (78 years)
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm , also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie, and the editor of Grimms' Fairy Tales. He was the older brother of Wilhelm Grimm; together, they were the literary duo known as the Brothers Grimm.
Go to Profile#3748
F. R. Scott
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Francis Reginald Scott , commonly known as Frank Scott or F. R. Scott, was a lawyer, Canadian poet, intellectual, and constitutional scholar. He helped found the first Canadian social democratic party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and its successor, the New Democratic Party. He won Canada's top literary prize, the Governor General's Award, twice, once for poetry and once for non-fiction. He was married to artist Marian Dale Scott.
Go to Profile#3749
Anton Menger
1841 - 1906 (65 years)
Anton Menger von Wolfensgrün , was an Austrian juridical expert and social theorist who aside from his collegiate works predominantly dedicated himself to propagating socialist literature on juridical grounds. He is the author of "The Right to the Whole Produce of Labor", "The Civil Law and the Poor" among others. He was the brother of Austrian economist Carl Menger.
Go to Profile#3750
Eduard Meijers
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Eduard Maurits Meijers was a Dutch jurist of Jewish background, who was the founding father of the current Dutch civil code, the Nieuw Burgerlijk Wetboek. Biography Family He was the son of Isidor Meijers, a naval physician, and Julie Wolff. Eduard married Tonij Gottschalk on 12 August 1909. The couple would get four daughters.
Go to Profile