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 …
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List of the most influential people in Law,
#401
Dan Kahan
#16852
Overall Influence
Dan M. Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His professional expertise is in the fields of criminal law and evidence, and he is known for his theory of cultural cognition.
Go to Profile#402
Gordon G. Chang
#10966
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gordon Guthrie Chang is an American journalist, lawyer, political commentator, and writer. He is the author of The Coming Collapse of China in which he attempted to predict the collapse of China and claimed that it would collapse by 2011. In December 2011, he changed the timing of the year of the predicted collapse to 2012.
Go to Profile#403
Michael Trebilcock
#18806
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Michael J. Trebilcock is a New Zealand-born, Canadian-based law academic. He is currently distinguished university professor and professor of law at the University of Toronto, specializing in law and economics.
Go to Profile#404
Randall Kennedy
#11809
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Randall LeRoy Kennedy is an American legal scholar. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University and his research focuses on the intersection of racial conflict and legal institutions in American life. He specializes in contracts, freedom of expression, race relations law, civil rights legislation, and the Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#405
Jessica Litman
#22446
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jessica Litman is a leading intellectual property scholar. She has been ranked as one of the most-cited U.S. law professors in the field of intellectual property/cyberlaw. Litman graduated from Reed College, received an MFA from Southern Methodist University, and received a JD from Columbia Law School. After law school, she served as a law clerk to Judge Betty Fletcher on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Go to Profile#406
William K. Black
#4725
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
William Kurt Black is an American lawyer, academic, author, and a former bank regulator. Black's expertise is in white-collar crime, public finance, regulation, and other topics in law and economics. He developed the concept of "control fraud", in which a business or national executive uses the entity he or she controls as a "weapon" to commit fraud.
Go to Profile#407
Michael H. Schill
#9675
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Michael Harry Schill is an American legal scholar and academic administrator currently serving as the 17th president of Northwestern University since September 2022. Schill previously served as the 18th president of the University of Oregon from 2015 to 2022, dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 2009 to 2015, and dean of the UCLA School of Law from 2004 to 2009.
Go to Profile#408
Richard H. Helmholz
#19807
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Richard H. Helmholz is the Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He received his LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1965 and also earned an A.B. in French literature at Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in medieval history from the University of California at Berkeley.
Go to Profile#409
Louis Henkin
#10651
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Louis Henkin , widely considered one of the most influential contemporary scholars of international law and the foreign policy of the United States, who was "often credited with creating the field of human rights law". He was a former president of the American Society of International Law and of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and University Professor emeritus at Columbia Law School. He was until his death the chairman of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Ph...
Go to Profile#410
Marc Bossuyt
#11500
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Marc, Baron Bossuyt is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague and a former judge at the Belgian Constitutional Court. Bossuyt obtained a Dr.iur at the University of Ghent in 1968, a Certificate of international relations at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna in 1969, and a PhD in political science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in 1975. He is professor emeritus of international law at the University of Antwerp.
Go to Profile#411
Ralph Richard Banks
#27088
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Ralph Richard Banks is a professor at Stanford Law School, where he has taught since 1998. He also teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. His scholarship focuses on race, inequality and the law. He published the book Is Marriage for White People?: How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone in 2011.
Go to Profile#412
Larry Kramer
#14798
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Larry D. Kramer is an American legal scholar and nonprofit executive. He is the current president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the former dean of Stanford Law School . He is a scholar of both constitutional law and civil procedure.
Go to Profile#413
Christopher L. Eisgruber
#13353
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Christopher Ludwig Eisgruber is an American academic and legal scholar who is serving as the 20th President of Princeton University, where he is also the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. He is also an expert on constitutional law, with an emphasis on law & religion and federal judicial appointments.
Go to Profile#414
Carel Stolker
#25734
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Carel Jan Jozef Marie Stolker is a Dutch academic administrator and the former rector magnificus and president of Leiden University from February 2013 to February 2021. He was the successor of Paul F. van der Heijden. Stolker is a professor of private law and former dean of the Leiden University Law School .
Go to Profile#415
Carl E. Douglas
#15795
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Carl Edwin Douglas is an American civil rights, wrongful death, personal injury, employment, and criminal defense attorney specializing in police misconduct cases. He is best known for being one of the defense attorneys in the O. J. Simpson murder case, who were collectively dubbed the "Dream Team". Douglas was the managing attorney at the law office of Johnnie Cochran Jr., before leaving to establish The Douglas Law Group in 1998. The practice is now known as Douglas / Hicks Law. Douglas' other notable clients have included: singer Michael Jackson, actors Jamie Foxx and Queen Latifah, and f...
Go to Profile#416
Bruce Winick
#17860
Overall Influence
1944 - 2010 (66 years)
Bruce J. Winick was the Silvers-Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he had taught since 1974. He was an internationally known scholar and lecturer in mental health law and in law and psychology. The co-founder of the school of social enquiry known as therapeutic jurisprudence, Winick is Director of the University of Miami School of Law’s recently established Therapeutic Jurisprudence Center. Winick also had a long career as a civil rights lawyer, and had served as an expert witness on a variety of law-related issues.
Go to Profile#417
Richard Pildes
#25874
Overall Influence
Richard H. Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law and a leading expert on constitutional law, the Supreme Court, the system of government in the United States, and legal issues concerning the structure of democracy, including election law. His scholarship focuses on public law and legal issues affecting democracy.
Go to Profile#418
Piotr Hofmański
#18154
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Piotr Józef Hofmański is a Polish jurist and judge who has served as President of the International Criminal Court since 2021. He has been a judge of the ICC since 2015. His election into the Presidency of the ICC is for a three-year term. Prior to his tenure as a judge of the ICC, Hofmański was a legal expert and advisor at the Council of Europe.
Go to Profile#419
Ward Farnsworth
#14961
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Ward Farnsworth is Professor of Law and holder of the W. Page Keeton Chair at the University of Texas School of Law, where he was Dean from 2012-2022. He served as Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Liability for Economic Harm, and is the author of books on law, rhetoric, philosophy, and chess.
Go to Profile#420
William Eskridge
#21893
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
William Nichol Eskridge Jr. is American academic and the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. He is one of the most cited law professors in America, ranking fourth overall for the period 2016–2020. He writes primarily on constitutional law, legislation and statutory interpretation, religion, marriage equality, and LGBT rights.
Go to Profile#421
Bruce H. Mann
#17974
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bruce Hartling Mann is an American legal scholar who is the Carl F. Schipper, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and husband of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. A legal historian, his research focuses on the relationship among legal, social, and economic change in early United States. He began teaching at Harvard Law School in 2006, after being the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Go to Profile#422
Eric Hilgendorf
#17616
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Eric Andreas Hilgendorf is a German professor of law and legal philosopher. He holds the Chair in Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Legal Theory, and Information and Computer Science Law at the University of Würzburg. Hilgendorf is one of Germany's most influential scholars in the field of criminal law, with special focuses on IT law as well as on artificial intelligence and law.
Go to Profile#423
Gillian E. Metzger
#13536
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Gillian E. Metzger is a United States constitutional law scholar and a professor of law at Columbia Law School. Early life and education The daughter of Columbia University history professor Walter P. Metzger, Gillian grew up on campus in faculty housing. She earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Yale University in 1987, and then worked as a legislative aide for District Council 37, a local union in New York City. Metzger then earned a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Oxford. After several years as a staff analyst for New York City government, Metzger enrolled in Columbia Law School, earning her J.D.
Go to Profile#424
Stephen Bright
#15153
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Stephen B. Bright is an American lawyer known for representing people facing the death penalty, advocating for the right to counsel for poor people accused of crimes, and challenging inhumane practices and conditions in prisons and jails. He has taught at Yale Law School since 1993 and has been teaching at the Georgetown Law Center since 2017 . In 2016, he ended almost 35 years at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, first as director from 1982 to 2005, and then as president and senior counsel from 2006 to 2016.
Go to Profile#425
Patrick Higginbotham
#21003
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Patrick Errol Higginbotham is an American judge and lawyer who serves as a Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Background and education Judge Higginbotham was born in McCalla, Alabama to George and Ann Higginbotham . The youngest of three, Higginbotham showed academic promise early in life.
Go to Profile#426
Michael J. Perry
#17914
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael J. Perry is an American legal scholar, specializing in constitutional law, human rights, and law and religion. Career Perry was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He did his undergraduate studies, majoring in philosophy and minoring in theology, at Georgetown University . He studied law at Columbia University School of Law . Perry then served as law clerk to U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein and, a year later, to U.S. Circuit Judge Shirley M. Hufstedler .
Go to Profile#427
James Anaya
#8778
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Stephen James Anaya is an American lawyer and the 16th Dean of the University of Colorado Boulder Law School. He was formerly the James J. Lenoir Professor of Human Rights Law and Policy at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law and previously served for more than ten years on the faculty at the University of Iowa College of Law. In March 2008, he was appointed by the United Nations as its Special Rapporteur on the situation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, replacing Rodolfo Stavenhagen. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical...
Go to Profile#428
Kate Stith
#26516
Overall Influence
Kate Stith, also known as Kate Stith-Cabranes, is the Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law and the former acting dean of Yale Law School. Her appointment was announced on March 23, 2009, by Yale University President Richard Levin, when former dean Harold Koh was nominated to serve as Legal Adviser of the Department of State. Stith is a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Go to Profile#429
Michael Wishnie
#27558
Overall Influence
Michael Wishnie is a Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Clinical work Wishnie teaches two clinics at Yale Law School. The "9/11 Clinic," known formally as "Balancing Civil Liberties and National Security after September 11," represents detainees in civil rights cases. The Workers and Immigrants Advocacy Clinic handles a host of immigrants' and workers' rights issues, including state and local law enforcement of civil immigration law, mandatory detention, labor trafficking, bilingual education, and access to welfare, in both the litigation and non-litigation context.
Go to Profile#430
Ben Saul
#20601
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Ben Saul is the current Challis Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. He has appeared as an advocate in international, regional and national courts outside Australia, and he is also admitted to practice as a barrister in New South Wales. His research interests include international law, in particular, international aspects of anti-terrorism law, humanitarian law, human rights law, among others.
Go to Profile#431
Flora D. Darpino
#31543
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Flora Diana Darpino is a retired United States Army lieutenant general and military lawyer who was the 39th Judge Advocate General of the United States Army. She was the first woman to hold that position, which she held from September 4, 2013 to July 14, 2017.
Go to Profile#432
Piero Schlesinger
#35321
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Piero Schlesinger was an Italian jurist, banker, lawyer and academic who served as president of the Banca Popolare di Milano from 1971 to 1993. Career Piero Schlesinger graduated in jurisprudence in Turin. In 1956 he began his academic career at the University of Urbino and, two years later, personally chosen by its dean and founder Father Agostino Gemelli, moved to the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan, where he held the chair of private law for over three decades.
Go to Profile#433
David Lametti
#13097
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
David T. Lametti is a Canadian politician who has been the Member of Parliament for LaSalle—Émard—Verdun since 2015. A member of the Liberal Party, Lametti served as minister of justice and attorney general of Canada from 2019 to 2023.
Go to Profile#434
Tove Stang Dahl
#19867
Overall Influence
1938 - 1993 (55 years)
Tove Stang Dahl was a Norwegian legal scholar, criminologist, Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo from 1988 until her death, and a pioneer of "feminist jurisprudence". She graduated with the cand.jur. degree in 1965 and was employed at the Faculty of Law directly upon graduation, first at the Department of Criminology and Criminal Law and then at the Department of Public and International Law. She was one of the founders of the field of women's law as an academic discipline at the University of Oslo in 1975, and became head of department for the new Department of Women's Law in 1978.
Go to Profile#435
Charles A. Reich
#20931
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Charles Alan Reich was an American academic and writer best known for writing the 1970 book, The Greening of America, a paean to the counterculture of the 1960s. Excerpts of the book first appeared in The New Yorker, and its seismic reception there contributed to the book leading The New York Times Best Seller list. Due to the theme and implications of this book Reich was described as a "high priest of antitechnology".
Go to Profile#436
Evan Wolfson
#12643
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Evan Wolfson is an attorney and gay rights advocate. He is the founder of Freedom to Marry, a group favoring same-sex marriage in the United States, serving as president until its 2015 victory and subsequent wind-down. Wolfson authored the book Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry, which Time Out New York magazine called, "Perhaps the most important gay-marriage primer ever written". He was listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. He has taught as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, Rutgers Law School, and Whittier Law School and argued before the Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v.
Go to Profile#437
Diane Marie Amann
#17506
Overall Influence
Diane Marie Amann is Regents' Professor of International Law and holds the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. She has served since mid-2017 as a faculty co-director of the law school's Dean Rusk International Law Center, a position she took up after completing a two-and-a-half-year term as Associate Dean for International Programs & Strategic Initiatives. Additionally, she serves as Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs and as an Affiliated Faculty Member at the Uni...
Go to Profile#438
Tadahiko Fukuhara
#20913
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Tadahiko Fukuhara is a Japanese academics, professor of civil law, member of the board of INES Corp and Japan Payment Service Association. In 2011 he became the president and chancellor of Chuo University, prior to that he was dean of the Chuo Graduate Law School at the Chuo University.
Go to Profile#439
Alon Harel
#12930
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Alon Harel is a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he holds the Phillip P. Mizock & Estelle Mizock Chair in Administrative and Criminal Law. He was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yale University, and Balliol College, Oxford . He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#440
John A. Powell
#21072
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John A. Powell is an African-American law professor. He leads the UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute and holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion, Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Powell spells his name in lowercase based on the idea that we should be "part of the universe, not over it, as capitals signify".
Go to Profile#441
Theo van Boven
#14240
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Theodoor Cornelis van Boven is a Dutch jurist and professor emeritus in international law. In 1977, he was appointed director of the United Nations' Division for Human Rights, a precursor of the UN Human Rights Office.
Go to Profile#442
Diosdado Macapagal
#8753
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Diosdado Pangan Macapagal Sr. was a Filipino lawyer, poet and politician who served as the ninth president of the Philippines, serving from 1961 to 1965, and the sixth vice president, serving from 1957 to 1961. He also served as a member of the House of Representatives, and headed the Constitutional Convention of 1970. He was the father of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who followed his path as president of the Philippines from 2001 to 2010.
Go to Profile#443
Julius Grey
#17799
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Julius H. Grey is a Canadian lawyer and university professor. He is particularly known for his expertise in constitutional and human rights law. He is a senior partner at the law firm Grey Casgrain, s.e.n.c.
Go to Profile#444
Melvin A. Eisenberg
#22532
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Melvin A. Eisenberg is the Jesse H. Choper Professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. After studying at Columbia University and Harvard University , he worked in the firm Kaye Scholer Fierman Hays & Handler, as assistant counsel in the Warren Commission, and joined Berkeley in 1966. He is recognised as a leading scholar in US corporate law, and contract law, in both of which he has authored leading textbooks.
Go to Profile#445
Christopher Edley Jr.
#21894
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Christopher Fairfield Edley Jr. was the Dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law from 2004 to 2013. He serves as President of the Opportunity Institute, an organization he co-founded with Hillary Clinton advisor Ann O'Leary.
Go to Profile#446
Vicki C. Jackson
#27708
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Vicki C. Jackson is the Laurence H. Tribe Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. The New York Times has described her as "an authority on state-federal questions". Biography Jackson received her BA, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1972. She earned her JD from Yale Law School in 1975, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She was a clerk for Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. Jackson was an associate and then partner at the firm of Rogovin, Huge & Lenzner in Washington, D.C. She served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the US Department of Justice.
Go to Profile#447
James Duane
#23914
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
James Joseph Duane is an American law professor at the Regent University School of Law, former criminal defense attorney, and Fifth Amendment expert. Duane has received considerable online attention for his lecture "Don't Talk to the Police", in which he advises citizens to avoid incriminating themselves by speaking to law enforcement officers.
Go to Profile#448
Christian Tomuschat
#18756
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Christian Tomuschat is a German jurist. He is emeritus professor of public international law and European law at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is a former member of the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN's International Law Commission.
Go to Profile#449
Conor Gearty
#17957
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Conor A. Gearty KC , is the Professor of Human Rights Law at LSE Department of Law. From 2002 to 2009, he was Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics. His academic research focuses primarily on civil liberties, terrorism and human rights.
Go to Profile#450
Donald L. Horowitz
#10468
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Donald L. Horowitz is James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science Emeritus at Duke Law School and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, United States. With law degrees from Syracuse and Harvard Universities, Donald Horowitz earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard. Most of his work has concerned ethnic conflict and accommodation in severely divided societies, based on a combination of extensive field research and wide knowledge of the phenomena in multiple countries, beginning with a long series of stays in Malaysia immediately after his Ph.D. studies. He has also pu...
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