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,
#4001
George Abbott
1887 - 1995 (108 years)
George Francis Abbott was an American theatre producer, director, playwright, screenwriter, film director and producer whose career spanned eight decades. He received numerous honors including six Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1982. the National Medal of Arts in 1990. and was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#4002
Ludovico Barassi
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
Ludovico Barassi was an Italian jurist and one of Italy's leading authorities on civil law in the first half of the 20th century. After studies in Pavia and Berlin, he assumed a professorship in Perugia in 1900 and later in Genoa, which he left for Pavia in 1917 and finally Milan's Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in 1924.
Go to Profile#4003
Andrey Vyshinsky
1883 - 1954 (71 years)
Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat. He is best known as a state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and in the Nuremberg trials. He was the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953, after having served as Deputy Foreign Minister under Vyacheslav Molotov since 1940. He also headed the Institute of State and Law in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
Go to Profile#4004
Philander C. Knox
1853 - 1921 (68 years)
Philander Chase Knox was an American lawyer, bank director and politician. A member of the Republican Party, Knox served in the Cabinet of three different presidents and represented Pennsylvania in the United States Senate.
Go to Profile#4005
Charles Warren
1868 - 1954 (86 years)
Charles Warren was an American lawyer and legal scholar who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Supreme Court in United States History . Early life Warren was born in Boston, Massachusetts, a great-great-grandson of Mercy Otis Warren and the son of lawyer Winslow Warren and Mary Lincoln Tinkham. The family moved to Dedham, Massachusetts, when Charles was three, where his biographer notes the family "remained active and loyal Democrats in a bastion of Republicanism." Following family tradition, he attended Harvard University, receiving an A.B. in 1889 and an A.M from Harvard Law School in 1892.
Go to Profile#4006
Randolph E. Paul
1890 - 1956 (66 years)
Randolph Evernghim Paul was a name partner of the international law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and was a lawyer specializing in tax law. He is credited as "an architect of the modern tax system."
Go to Profile#4007
Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach
1775 - 1833 (58 years)
Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach was a German legal scholar. His major achievement was a reform of the Bavarian penal code which led to the abolition of torture and became a model for several other countries. He is also well known for his research on Kaspar Hauser, who died the same year as Feuerbach.
Go to Profile#4008
Thomas F. Bayard
1828 - 1898 (70 years)
Thomas Francis Bayard was an American lawyer, politician and diplomat from Wilmington, Delaware. A Democrat, he served three terms as the United States Senator from Delaware and made three unsuccessful bids for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. In 1885, President Grover Cleveland appointed him Secretary of State. After four years in private life, he returned to the diplomatic arena as Ambassador to Great Britain.
Go to Profile#4009
Abu Hafs Umar al-Nasafi
1067 - 1142 (75 years)
Najm ad-Dīn Abū Ḥafṣ 'Umar ibn Muḥammad an-Nasafī was a Muslim jurist, theologian, mufassir, muhaddith and historian. A Persian scholar born in present-day Uzbekistan, he wrote mostly in Arabic.
Go to Profile#4010
Melville Nimmer
1923 - 1985 (62 years)
Melville Bernard Nimmer was an American lawyer and law professor, renowned as an expert in freedom of speech and United States copyright law. Nimmer graduated from UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the California State Bar in January 1951. He was professor at the UCLA School of Law from 1962. One year later, he published the two-volume treatise that would become the leading secondary source on copyright law, Nimmer on Copyright. In 1984, he published a one-volume treatise on freedom of speech, titled appropriately Nimmer on Freedom of Speech: Treatise on Theory of...
Go to Profile#4011
Wilhelm Malaniuk
1906 - 1965 (59 years)
Wilhelm Malaniuk was an Austrian judge and legal scholar. Life Wilhelm Malaniuk grew up in Baden near Vienna. His father Lukas Malaniuk, a professional k.u.k.soldier, was born in Biały Kamień and headed the Sauerhof hospital and recreation home there after the First World War.
Go to Profile#4012
Johann Stephan Pütter
1725 - 1807 (82 years)
Johann Stephan Pütter was a German law lecturer and publicist. He was professor of law at the university of Göttingen from 1746 until his death. He exerted great influence on the law institutions of his time. His principal work is Historische Entwicklung der heutigen Staatsverfassung des Deutschen Reichs .
Go to Profile#4013
Włodzimierz Spasowicz
1829 - 1906 (77 years)
Włodzimierz Spasowicz or Vladimir Spasovich was a Polish-Russian lawyer often acclaimed as the most brilliant defense attorney of Imperial Russia. Spasovich attended school in Minsk and studied law in St. Petersburg University, where he later became a professor. When the government was persecuting some of his students in 1861, Spasovich resigned his professorship in protest. Two years later, his textbook on criminal law was banned.
Go to Profile#4014
Paul Samuel Reinsch
1869 - 1923 (54 years)
Paul Samuel Reinsch , was an American political scientist and diplomat. He played an influential role in developing the field of international relations. Career overview Reinsch was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin of German-American parents. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1892, attended the school of law there, and after graduating in 1894, was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Milwaukee for some time.
Go to Profile#4015
Arabella Mansfield
1846 - 1911 (65 years)
Arabella Mansfield , born Belle Aurelia Babb, became the first female lawyer in the United States in 1869, admitted to the Iowa bar; she made her career as a college educator and administrator. Despite an Iowa state law restricting the bar exam to males, Mansfield had taken it and earned high scores. Shortly after her court challenge, Iowa amended its licensing statute and became the first state to accept women and minorities into its bar.
Go to Profile#4016
John Jay
1817 - 1894 (77 years)
John Jay was an American lawyer and diplomat to Austria-Hungary, serving from 1869 to 1875. He was the son of William Jay and a grandson of John Jay, a former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Jay was active in the anti-slavery movement, elected president of the New York Young Men's Antislavery Society while still in college. He published several speeches and pamphlets on slavery and history, and was elected in 1889 as president of the American Historical Association.
Go to Profile#4017
Wade H. McCree
1920 - 1987 (67 years)
Wade Hampton McCree Jr. was an American legal scholar and judge. He was the first African American appointed as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the second African-American United States Solicitor General in the history of the United States. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School after leaving government service in 1981, and taught there until the time of his death.
Go to Profile#4018
Al-Suyuti
1445 - 1505 (60 years)
Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti , or Al-Suyuti, was an Egyptian Sunni polymath. Considered the Mujtahid and Mujaddid of the Islamic 10th century. Foremost leading muhaddith , mufassir , faqīh , usuli , sufi , theologian, grammarian, linguist, rhetorician, philologist, lexicographer and historian, who authored works in virtually every Islamic science. For this reason, he was honoured one of the most prestigious and rarest titles; Shaykh al-Islām.
Go to Profile#4019
Travers Twiss
1809 - 1897 (88 years)
Sir Travers Twiss QC FRS was an English jurist. He had a distinguished academic and legal career culminating in his appointment as Queen's Advocate-General. Twiss was particularly noted for his contribution to the theory of international law. He was widely consulted, and was asked to draw up the constitution of the Congo Free State. A prolific author, Twiss wrote many influential textbooks on legal matters.
Go to Profile#4020
Karl Engisch
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Karl Engisch was a German jurist and a Philosopher of Law. He was described by Hans Joachim Hirsch as one of the "outstanding theorists of criminal justice of the [twentieth] century" . Life Karl Engisch was born in 1899 in Gießen, a mid-sized university town north of Frankfurt. Friedrich Engisch , his father was a lawyer. He passed his Abitur which would normally have opened the way to a university education, but these were the war years, and the eighteen year old was now sent to take part in the fighting. He was wounded twice.
Go to Profile#4021
Valtazar Bogišić
1834 - 1908 (74 years)
Valtazar Bogišić , also known as Baltazar Bogišić, was a Serbian jurist and a pioneer in sociology. In the domain of private law his most notable research was on family structure and the unique Montenegrin civil code of 1888. He is considered to be a pioneer in the sociology of law and sociological jurisprudence. He was also a follower of the German Historical School of law, and may be considered a transitional figure between the Historical School and sociological approaches to law. In 1902 Bogišić was elected president of the International Institute of Sociology in Paris.
Go to Profile#4022
Sophonisba Breckinridge
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge was an American activist, Progressive Era social reformer, social scientist and innovator in higher education. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in political science and economics then the J.D. at the University of Chicago, and she was the first woman to pass the Kentucky bar. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent her as a delegate to the 7th Pan-American Conference in Uruguay, making her the first woman to represent the U.S. government at an international conference. She led the process of creating the academic professional discipline and degree for social work.
Go to Profile#4023
Eugene Wambaugh
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Eugene Wambaugh was an American legal scholar. He was born on a farm near Brookville, Ohio to Rev. A. B. Wambaugh and Sarah Wells Wambaugh. He was educated at Harvard . Admitted to the Ohio bar in 1880, he practiced law in Cincinnati until 1889. He was professor of law at the State University of Iowa College of Law from 1889 to 92 and thenceforth at Harvard. From 1906 to 1913, he was a member of the American Political Science Review, and from 1908 to 1912 served as special attorney of the United States Bureau of Corporations. Several universities gave him the honorary degree of LL.D. Hi...
Go to Profile#4024
Herbert Kraus
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Herbert Kraus was a German professor of public international law. He was the first director of the Institute of International Law at the University of Göttingen. Due to his criticism of Nazism he was forced to retire between 1937 and 1945.
Go to Profile#4025
Louis Marshall
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Louis Marshall was an American corporate, constitutional and civil rights lawyer as well as a mediator and Jewish community leader who worked to secure religious, political, and cultural freedom for all minority groups. Among the founders of the American Jewish Committee , he defended Jewish and minority rights. He was also a conservationist, and the force behind re-establishing the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, which evolved into today's State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry .
Go to Profile#4026
José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia
1766 - 1840 (74 years)
José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco was a Paraguayan lawyer and politician, and the first dictator of Paraguay following its 1811 independence from the Spanish Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. His official title was "Supreme and Perpetual Dictator of Paraguay", but he was popularly known as El Supremo.
Go to Profile#4027
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...
Go to Profile#4028
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...
Go to Profile#4029
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.
Go to Profile#4030
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.
Go to Profile#4031
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.
Go to Profile#4032
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.
Go to Profile#4033
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.
Go to Profile#4034
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.
Go to Profile#4035
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.
Go to Profile#4036
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".
Go to Profile#4037
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.
Go to Profile#4038
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.
Go to Profile#4039
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.
Go to Profile#4040
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...
Go to Profile#4041
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.
Go to Profile#4042
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.
Go to Profile#4043
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.
Go to Profile#4044
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."
Go to Profile#4045
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.
Go to Profile#4046
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.
Go to Profile#4047
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.
Go to Profile#4048
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.
Go to Profile#4049
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...
Go to Profile#4050
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.
Go to Profile