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,
#3951
Benjamin Butler
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Benjamin Franklin Butler was an American major general of the Union Army, politician, lawyer, and businessman from Massachusetts. Born in New Hampshire and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, Butler is best known as a political major general of the Union Army during the American Civil War and for his leadership role in the impeachment of U.S. President Andrew Johnson. He was a colorful and often controversial figure on the national stage and on the Massachusetts political scene, serving five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and running several campaigns for governor before his election...
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Johann Jakob Bachofen
1815 - 1887 (72 years)
Johann Jakob Bachofen was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor for Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1845. Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric matriarchy, or Das Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World. Bachofen assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum. He postulated an archaic "mother-right" within the context of a...
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Maurycy Allerhand
1868 - 1942 (74 years)
Maurycy Allerhand was a Polish lawyer and the Professor of Law at the Lviv University . His authored more than 1,000 works including publications in the field of procedural law as well as civil and commercial ethnography. He was murdered in Belzec during the Holocaust.
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Emilio Betti
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Emilio Betti was an Italian jurist, Roman Law scholar, philosopher and theologian. He is best known for his contributions to hermeneutics, part of a broad interest in interpretation. As a legal theorist, Betti is close to interpretivism.
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Victor D'Hondt
1841 - 1901 (60 years)
Victor Joseph Auguste D'Hondt was a Belgian lawyer and jurist of civil law at Ghent University. He devised a procedure, the D'Hondt method, which he first described in 1878, for allocating seats to candidates in party-list proportional representation elections. The method has been adopted by a number of countries, including Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Fiji, Finland, Israel, Japan, North Macedonia, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Slovenia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Iceland, Uruguay and Wales.
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Hajime Kaneko
1906 - 1973 (67 years)
Hajime Kaneko was a Japanese jurist noted for his contributions to the law of civil procedure. Kaneko was appointed professor at the University of Tokyo in 1931, and left the chair in 1950 to practice law. His writings contributed to the dogmatic structure of civil procedure, and his textbook System of Civil Procedure Law was very influential in teaching and legal practice.
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Vasco Núñez de Balboa
1475 - 1519 (44 years)
Vasco Núñez de Balboa was a Spanish explorer, governor, and conquistador. He is best known for having crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean in 1513, becoming the first European to lead an expedition to have seen or reached the Pacific from the New World.
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Antoni Peretiatkowicz
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Antoni Peretiatkowicz was a Polish legal scholar, considered one of the most prominent legal jurists of twentieth century Poland. Studies Peretiatkowicz began law studies in Warsaw in 1902 and continued in Berlin, Lviv , and Cracow . He received a doctorate degree from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow in 1909. From 1909 to 1914, Peretiatkowicz continued his post-doctoral studies in Paris, Geneva, and Heidelberg. Under the influence of Georg Jellinek, Peretiatkowicz came to a decision to concentrate on constitutional law and political doctrines as his main area of research.
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Rodulfo Brito Foucher
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Rodulfo Brito Foucher was a Mexican lawyer and academic who was rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1942 to 1944. He was the father of journalist and feminist activist Esperanza Brito de Martí.
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William Walker
1824 - 1860 (36 years)
William Walker was an American physician, lawyer, journalist, and mercenary. In the era of the expansion of the United States, driven by the doctrine of "manifest destiny", Walker organized unauthorized military expeditions into Mexico and Central America with the intention of establishing slave-holding colonies. Such an enterprise was known at the time as "filibustering".
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A. K. Fazlul Huq
1873 - 1962 (89 years)
Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq , popularly known as Sher-e-Bangla , was a Bengali lawyer and politician who presented the Lahore Resolution which had the objective of creating an independent Pakistan. He also served as the first and longest Prime Minister of Bengal during the British Raj.
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Nassau William Senior
1790 - 1864 (74 years)
Nassau William Senior , was an English lawyer known as an economist. He was also a government adviser over several decades on economic and social policy on which he wrote extensively. Early life He was born at Compton, Berkshire, the eldest son of Rev. J. R. Senior, vicar of Durnford, Wiltshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford; at university he was a private pupil of Richard Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin with whom he remained connected by ties of lifelong friendship. He took the degree of B.A. in 1811 and became a Vinerian Scholar in 1813.
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Paul M. Bator
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Paul Michael Bator was an American legal academic, Supreme Court advocate and expert on United States federal courts. In addition to teaching for almost 30 years at Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, Bator served as Deputy Solicitor General of the United States during the Reagan Administration.
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Vittorio Emanuele Orlando
1860 - 1952 (92 years)
Vittorio Emanuele Orlando was an Italian statesman, who served as the Prime Minister of Italy from October 1917 to June 1919. Orlando is best known for representing Italy in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference with his foreign minister Sidney Sonnino. He was also known as "Premier of Victory" for defeating the Central Powers along with the Entente in World War I. He was also the provisional President of the Chamber of Deputies between 1943 and 1945, and a member of the Constituent Assembly that changed the Italian form of government into a republic. Aside from his prominent political role, Orland...
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Niels Nikolaus Falck
1784 - 1850 (66 years)
Niels Nikolaus Falck was a Danish jurist and historian. Biography He was born at Emmerlef in the Duchy of Schleswig. He was educated at the University of Kiel and became a theological candidate in 1808, graduating dr. phil. in 1809. From 1813 he was appointed professor juris in Kiel. In 1814, he became professor of law at the University of Kiel, and in 1838 he was appointed president of the Schleswig-Holstein Assembly of the States.
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Bernhard Windscheid
1817 - 1892 (75 years)
Bernhard Windscheid was a German jurist and a member of the pandectistic school of law thought. He became famous with his essay on the concept of a legal action, which sparkled a debate with that is said to have initiated the studies of the processal law as we know it today. Windscheid's thesis established the modern German law concept of Anspruch , distinguishing it from the Roman law concept of actio.
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Martin Wolff
1872 - 1953 (81 years)
Martin Wolff was a professor of law at the University of Berlin in Germany. In 1934, he was expelled from his post by the Nazis and emigrated to Britain, where he became a fellow at Oxford University. He specialized in private international law and property law, writing numerous works, including standard works in German and English.
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Lew Wallace
1827 - 1905 (78 years)
Lewis Wallace was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, artist, and author from Indiana. Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ , a bestselling novel that has been called "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century."
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Rudolf Sieverts
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Rudolf Sieverts was a German Law professor and Criminologist. Life Rudolf Sieverts was born in Meißen, a short distance down river from Dresden. His father, Adolf Ferdinand Sieverts, was a Chemistry professor.
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Alexandre Millerand
1859 - 1943 (84 years)
Alexandre Millerand was a French politician. He was Prime Minister of France from 20 January to 23 September 1920 and President of France from 23 September 1920 to 11 June 1924. His participation in Waldeck-Rousseau's cabinet at the start of the 20th century, alongside the Marquis de Galliffet, who had directed the repression of the 1871 Paris Commune, sparked a debate in the French Section of the Workers' International and in the Second International about the participation of socialists in bourgeois governments.
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Robert R. McCormick
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Robert Rutherford "Colonel" McCormick was an American lawyer, businessman and anti-war activist. A member of the McCormick family of Chicago, McCormick became a lawyer, Republican Chicago alderman, distinguished U.S. Army officer in World War I, and eventually owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. A leading Republican and isolationist; McCormick opposed the increase in federal power brought about by the New Deal and later opposed American entry into World War II. His legacy includes what is now the McCormick Foundation philanthropic organization.
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Paltiel Daykan
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Paltiel Daykan was an Israeli jurist. Early life Daykan was born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1885. He emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1921. Awards In 1957, Daykan was awarded the Israel Prize, for jurisprudence.
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Max Rheinstein
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Max Rheinstein was a German-born American jurist and political scientist. He was for many years a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Biography Max Rheinstein was born on July 5, 1899, in Bad Kreuznach, the only son of wine merchant Ferdinand Rheinstein and Rosalie Bernheim . He fought in the German Army in World War I, and subsequently studied law at the University of Munich. In the spring of 1919 Rheinstein participated in the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Becoming an assistant of Ernst Rabel, Rheinstein received his doctorate in law in 1924. He subsequently fol...
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Gaston Doumergue
1863 - 1937 (74 years)
Pierre Paul Henri Gaston Doumergue was a French politician of the Third Republic. He served as President of France from 1924 to 1931, succeeding Alexandre Millerand, who had resigned. Tasked with important ministerial portfolios, he was first appointed President of the Council of Ministers in 1913, but was forced to leave power a few months after his appointment. He was elected as President of the Senate in 1923.
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Laurence Olivier
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, was an English actor and director who, along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, was one of a trio of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles. Late in his career he had considerable success in television roles.
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Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
1486 - 1535 (49 years)
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was a German Renaissance polymath, physician, legal scholar, soldier, knight, theologian, and occult writer. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy published in 1533 drew heavily upon Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and neo-Platonism. His book was widely influential among esotericists of the early modern period, and was condemned as heretical by the inquisitor of Cologne.
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Johann Gottlieb Heineccius
1681 - 1741 (60 years)
Johann Gottlieb Heineccius was a German jurist from Eisenberg, Thuringia. Life He studied theology at Leipzig, and law at Halle; and at the latter university he was appointed in 1713 professor of philosophy, and in 1718 professor of jurisprudence. He subsequently filled legal chairs at Franeker in the Netherlands and at Frankfurt, but finally returned to Halle in 1733 as professor of philosophy and jurisprudence.
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Alejandro Álvarez
1868 - 1960 (92 years)
Manuel Alejandro Álvarez Jofré was a Chilean professor of international law and a judge at the International Court of Justice. He had been a founding member of the American Institute of International Law and of the Institute of Higher International Studies, from the Faculty of Law of Paris. He served as a judge in the International Court of Justice in 1946–1955.
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François Hotman
1524 - 1590 (66 years)
François Hotman was a French Protestant lawyer and writer, associated with the legal humanists and with the monarchomaques, who struggled against absolute monarchy. His first name is often written 'Francis' in English. His surname is Latinized by himself as Hotomanus, by others as Hotomannus and Hottomannus. He has been called "one of the first modern revolutionaries".
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Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane
1856 - 1928 (72 years)
Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, was a British lawyer and philosopher and an influential Liberal and later Labour politician. He was Secretary of State for War between 1905 and 1912 during which time the "Haldane Reforms" of the British Army were implemented. As an intellectual he was fascinated with German thought. That led to his role in seeking detente with Germany in 1912 in the Haldane Mission. The mission was a failure and tensions with Berlin forced London to work more closely with Paris.
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Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke
1690 - 1764 (74 years)
Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, was an English lawyer and politician who served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. He was a close confidant of the Duke of Newcastle, Prime Minister between 1754 and 1756 and 1757 until 1762.
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Oscar Micheaux
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux Early life and education Micheaux was born on a farm in Metropolis, Illinois, on January 2, 1884. He was the fifth child born to Calvin S. and Belle Michaux, who had a total of 13 children. In his later years, Micheaux added an "e" to his last name. His father was born a slave in Kentucky. Because of his surname, his father's family appears to have been enslaved by French-descended settlers. French Huguenot refugees had settled in Virginia in 1700; their descendants took slaves west when they migrated into Kentucky after the American Revolutionary War.
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Ernst Ferdinand Klein
1743 - 1810 (67 years)
Ernst Ferdinand Klein was a German jurist and prominent representative of the Berlin Enlightenment. Career Klein studied law at Halle under Daniel Nettelbladt, a follower of Christian Wolff, before practising law in Breslau. In 1781 he moved to Berlin, where he served in the Prussian justice department as an adviser to Frederick's High Chancellor Johann H. C. von Carmer and worked with Carl Gottlieb Svarez to co-author the reforming Prussian Civil Code, the Allgemeines Landrecht. He was active in the Mittwochsgesellschaft : his Freiheit und Eigenthum was presented as a set of dialogues between members of the society.
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William H. Crawford
1772 - 1834 (62 years)
William Harris Crawford was an American politician and judge during the early 19th century. He served as US Secretary of War and US Secretary of the Treasury before he ran for US president in the 1824 election.
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Francesco Carnelutti
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
Francesco Carnelutti was an Italian jurist and lawyer. Born in Udine, Carnelutti graduated in law at the University of Padua. Starting from 1910, he was professor of industrial law at the Bocconi University in Milan, professor of commercial law at the University of Catania, and professor of civil procedure in his alma mater, at the Bocconi University and at the Sapienza University of Rome.
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John Henry Wigmore
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
John Henry Wigmore was an American lawyer and legal scholar known for his expertise in the law of evidence and for his influential scholarship. Wigmore taught law at Keio University in Tokyo before becoming the first full-time dean of Northwestern Law School . His scholarship is best remembered for his Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law , often simply called Wigmore on Evidence, and a graphical analysis method known as a Wigmore chart.
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Johannes Voet
1647 - 1713 (66 years)
Johannes Voet, also known as John Voet , was a Dutch jurist whose work remains highly influential in modern Roman-Dutch law. Voet is one of the so-called "old authorities" of Roman-Dutch law, along with Hugo Grotius, Simon van Leeuwen , Joan Cos, Gerhard Noodt, Zacharias Huber, Cornelius van Bynkershoek, Hobins van der Vorm, Gerloff Scheltinga , Willem Schorer , Franciscus Lievens Kersteman, J. Munniks, Hendrik Jan Arntzenius , Arent Lybrechts, Johan Jacob van Hasselet, Gerard de Haas, Cornelis Willem Decker, Didericus Lulius, Renier van Spaan, Dionysius Godefridus van der Keessel, and Johan v...
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Joseph Henry Beale
1861 - 1943 (82 years)
Joseph Henry Beale was an American law professor at Harvard Law School and served as the first dean of University of Chicago Law School. He was notable for his advancement of legal formalism, as well as his work in Conflict of Laws, Corporations, and Criminal Law.
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Edwin Stanton
1814 - 1869 (55 years)
Edwin McMasters Stanton was an American lawyer and politician who served as U.S. Secretary of War under the Lincoln Administration during most of the American Civil War. Stanton's management helped organize the massive military resources of the North and guide the Union to victory. However, he was criticized by many Union generals, who perceived him as overcautious and micromanaging. He also organized the manhunt for Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
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Edward Livingston
1764 - 1836 (72 years)
Edward Livingston was an American jurist and statesman. He was an influential figure in the drafting of the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825, a civil code based largely on the Napoleonic Code. Livingston represented both New York and then Louisiana in Congress and served as the U.S. Secretary of State from 1831 to 1833 and Minister to France from 1833 to 1835 under President Andrew Jackson. He was also the 46th mayor of New York City.
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Alexander Bickel
1924 - 1974 (50 years)
Alexander Mordecai Bickel was an American legal scholar and expert on the United States Constitution. One of the most influential constitutional commentators of the twentieth century, his writings emphasize judicial restraint.
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Grant Gilmore
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Grant Gilmore was an American law professor who taught at Yale Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, the College of Law at the Ohio State University, and Vermont Law School. He was a scholar of commercial law and one of the principal drafters of the Uniform Commercial Code.
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Roger Sherman
1721 - 1793 (72 years)
Roger Sherman was an early American statesman, lawyer, and a Founding Father of the United States. He is the only person to sign all four great state papers of the United States: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He also signed the 1774 Petition to the King.
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Felix Dahn
1834 - 1912 (78 years)
Felix Dahn was a German law professor, German nationalist author, poet and historian. Biography Ludwig Julius Sophus Felix Dahn was born in Hamburg as the oldest son of Friedrich and Constanze Dahn who were notable actors at the city's theatre. The family had both German and French roots. Dahn began his studies in law and philosophy in Munich , and graduated as Doctor of Laws in Berlin. After his habilitation treatise, Dahn became a lecturer of German Law in Munich in 1857. In 1863 he became senior lecturer/associate professor in Würzburg, received a professorship in Königsberg .
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Bartolus de Saxoferrato
1313 - 1357 (44 years)
Bartolus de Saxoferrato was an Italian law professor and one of the most prominent continental jurists of Medieval Roman Law. He belonged to the school known as the commentators or postglossators. The admiration of later generations of civil lawyers is shown by the adage nemo bonus íurista nisi bartolista — no one is a good jurist unless he is a Bartolist .
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James M. Landis
1899 - 1964 (65 years)
James McCauley Landis was an American government official and legal adviser. He served as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1935 to 1937. Biography Landis was born in Tokyo, Japan, where his parents were teachers at a missionary school. After completing his studies at Mercersburg Academy in 1916, he graduated from Princeton University and in 1924 received a LL.B. from Harvard Law School, where he was a student of Felix Frankfurter. In 1925, Landis was a law clerk to Justice Louis Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court. He then became a professor at Harvard Law School, until ...
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Léon Duguit
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
Léon Duguit was a leading French scholar of public law . After a stint at Caen from 1882 to 1886, he was appointed to a chair of constitutional law at the University of Bordeaux in 1892, where one of his colleagues was Émile Durkheim.
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Midhat Pasha
1822 - 1883 (61 years)
Ahmed Şefik Midhat Pasha was an Ottoman politician, reformist and statesman. He was the author of the Constitution of the Ottoman Empire. Midhat was born in Istanbul and educated from a private . In July 1872, he was appointed grand vizier by Abdulaziz , though was removed in August. During the First Constitutional Era, in 1876, he co-founded the Ottoman Parliament. Midhat was noted as a kingmaker and leading Ottoman democrat. He was part of a governing elite which recognized the crisis the Empire was in and considered reform to be a dire need. Midhat was reportedly killed in al-Ta'if.
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Irnerius
1050 - 1140 (90 years)
Irnerius , sometimes referred to as lucerna juris , was an Italian jurist, and founder of the School of Glossators and thus of the tradition of medieval Roman Law. He taught the newly recovered Roman lawcode of Justinian I, the Corpus Juris Civilis, among the liberal arts at the University of Bologna, his native city. The recovery and revival of Roman law, taught first at Bologna in the 1070s, was a momentous event in European cultural history. Irnerius' interlinear glosses on the Corpus Juris Civilis stand at the beginnings of a European law that was written, systematic, comprehensive and rat...
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Coco Chanel
1883 - 1971 (88 years)
Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel was a French fashion designer and businesswoman. The founder and namesake of the Chanel brand, she was credited in the post–World War I era with popularizing a sporty, casual chic as the feminine standard of style. This replaced the "corseted silhouette" that had earlier been dominant with a style that was simpler, far less time-consuming to put on and remove, more comfortable, and less expensive, all without sacrificing elegance. She is the only fashion designer listed on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. A prolific f...
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