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,
#3851
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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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.
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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 ...
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Ibn Taymiyyah
1263 - 1328 (65 years)
#3870
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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Paul Bruton
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Paul Wesley Bruton was the Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law and the Algernon Sydney Biddle Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Biography Bruton received his A.B. and his LL.B. in 1929 from the University of California, and his J.S.D. in 1930 from Yale University.
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Clyde Pharr
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Clyde Pharr was an American classics professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, Southwestern Presbyterian University , Vanderbilt University , and, finally, at the University of Texas at Austin. Early life Pharr was born in Saltillo, Texas, the son of Samuel Milton Pharr and Josephine Fleming Pharr. He attended Saltillo High School and earned B.S. and A.B. degrees from East Texas Normal College in 1903 and 1905, respectively. He continued his education at Yale University, earning another A.B. there in 1906. He was named an Abernathy Fellow at Yale, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1910. From 1...
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Samuel H. Fisher
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Samuel Herbert Fisher was an American attorney and print historian. He was a member of the Acorn Club, to which he was elected in 1933. Fisher was a fellow of the Yale Corporation and chaired the Connecticut Tercentenary Commission. He received honorary degrees from Yale University, Colgate University, and Wesleyan University.
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Gotthold Bohne
1890 - 1957 (67 years)
Gotthold Bohne was a German law professor. Life Gotthold Hermann Bohne was born in Burgstädt near Chemnitz. He studied at the universities of Greifswald, Jena und Leipzig a palette of subjects covering Theology, Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. His academic progress was interrupted by the First World War during which he undertook military service. After the war ended he received his doctorate in Jurisprudence from the University of Leipzig in 1920. His habilitation in criminal justice, from the same institution. followed just a year later, clearing the way for an academic care...
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David Hughes Parry
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Sir David Hughes Parry was a university administrator, Professor of Law and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1945 to 1948. He was also founder of the university's Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in 1947.
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Pauli Murray
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray was an American civil rights activist, advocate, legal scholar and theorist, author and – later in life – an Episcopal priest. Murray's work influenced the civil rights movement and expanded legal protection for gender equality.
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Arthur Corbin
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
Arthur Linton Corbin was an American lawyer and legal scholar who was a professor at Yale Law School. He contributed to the development of the philosophy of law known as legal realism, and he wrote one of the most celebrated legal treatises of the 20th century, Corbin on Contracts.
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Coleman Phillipson
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Coleman Phillipson was an English legal scholar and historian. He was Professor of Law at Adelaide University 1919–1925. History Phillipson was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, the eldest son of Mr and Mrs S. Phillipson, both practising Jews. He was educated at the Central High School, Leeds, and Yorkshire College, University of Leeds, where he won prizes for French, English literature, theory of education, and debating. He secured a teaching position in a boarding school before embarking on Law studies at the Victoria University of Manchester followed by the University College of London, where he was Quain prizeman in Comparative Law 1906–1908.
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Julius Stone
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
Julius Stone was Challis Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Sydney from 1942 to 1972, and thereafter a visiting Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales and concurrently Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the Hastings College of Law, University of California.
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Herbert W. Briggs
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Herbert Whittaker Briggs was an American lawyer and professor at Cornell University. Life Briggs was born in Wilmington, Delaware to Frederic F. Briggs and Eleanore A. Briggs , a grand-niece of manufacturer and philanthropist John Price Crozer. In 1921, Briggs was awarded a Bachelor of Arts from West Virginia University. This was followed by doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University; he received his Ph.D. in 1925. Briggs then worked as a lecturer at Oberlin College, before he moved to Cornell University in 1929. There he received a call in 1947 for a professorship at Cornell. He is considered one of the founders of the Department of Political Science at Cornell University.
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Maxime Leroy
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
Maxime Leroy was a French jurist and social historian. Career Maxime Leroy studied law at the university of Nancy, where he obtained his doctorate in 1898. A friend of Victor Griffuelhes and Alphonse Merrheim, he devoted his first works to the development of trade unionism and its legal and social impact. In 1909 he founded the "Société des amis du lac" at Soorts-Hossegor, where writers such as J.-H. Rosny jeune, Paul Margueritte and Gaston Chérau had been meeting for some years. A member of the Human Rights League of France and a supporter of the League of Nations, he participated in numerous international meetings and had a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and H.G.
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Oswald Avery
1877 - 1955 (78 years)
Oswald Theodore Avery Jr. was a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher. The major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for the experiment that isolated DNA as the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.
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Gertrud Schubart-Fikentscher
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Gertrud Schubart-Fikentscher became Germany's first female professor of Law in September 1948, and remained the country's only female university law professor - after 1957 an emeritus law professor - for seventeen years. She taught at the University of Halle. By the time she received and accepted her professorship she was a few months short of her fifty-second birthday, reflecting a somewhat indirect career trajectory, her having grown up in a country where the educational system was not set up to enable women either to study or teach at any university.
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Adrian S. Fisher
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Adrian Sanford Fisher was an American lawyer and federal public servant, who served from the late 1930s through the early 1980s. He was associated with the Department of War and Department of State throughout his professional career. He participated in the U.S. government's decision to carry out Japanese-American internment and the international Nuremberg trial, and in State Department Cold War activities during the Harry S. Truman administration. He was the State Department Legal Adviser under Secretary of State Dean Acheson. During the John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter...
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Karl Llewellyn
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
Karl Nickerson Llewellyn was an American jurisprudential scholar associated with the school of legal realism. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Llewellyn as one of the twenty most cited American legal scholars of the 20th century.
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Josef Laurenz Kunz
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Josef Laurenz Kunz was an Austrian American jurist. He was a Professor of International Law at the University of Toledo from 1934 to 1960, after having emigrated from Austria in 1932. Kunz earned his doctorate degree in 1920 from the University of Vienna, where he was a student of Hans Kelsen.
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Wolfgang Friedmann
1907 - 1972 (65 years)
Wolfgang Gaston Friedmann was a German American legal scholar. Specializing in international law, he was a faculty member at Columbia Law School. Biography Born in Berlin, Friedmann finished his studies of law at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1930. Being Jewish, he immigrated to London in 1934, shortly after the Nazis' seizure of power in Germany. He obtained a University of London LLM, taught at University College London, became a British citizen in 1939 and served in the British Army during the Second World War.
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Robert Redslob
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Robert Redslob was a German-French constitutional and public international law-scientist who was critical of the French constitution in the early twentieth century. He was born in Straßburg in Elsass-Lothringen. From 1900 to 1906 he studied Law in Straßburg and in Berlin. In 1913 he accepted a position as professor at the University of Rostock, and after the First World War he returned to Strasbourg to the newly established University of Strasbourg.
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Irving Younger
1932 - 1988 (56 years)
Irving Younger was an American lawyer, law professor, judge, and writer. He is well known among lawyers and law students for his energetic talks on effective trial advocacy and legal history. Biography Younger was born in New York City and attended high school at the Bronx High School of Science, followed by undergraduate studies at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1953. After serving for two years in the United States Army, Younger obtained his Juris Doctor degree from New York University Law School in 1958. He was married to Judith T. Younger , who is also a lawyer and law p...
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