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).
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List of the most influential people in Law,
#4051
Otto Lenel
1849 - 1935 (86 years)
Otto Lenel was a German Jewish jurist and legal historian. His most important achievements are in the field of Roman law. Life and career Otto Lenel was born in Mannheim, Germany on 13 December 1849. He was the son of Moritz Lenel and Caroline Scheuer. He fought in the war against France in 1870/71.
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Stanley Forman Reed
1884 - 1980 (96 years)
Stanley Forman Reed was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1938 to 1957. He also served as U.S. Solicitor General from 1935 to 1938. Born in Mason County, Kentucky, Reed established a legal practice in Maysville, Kentucky, and won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives. He attended law school but did not graduate, making him the latest-serving Supreme Court Justice who did not graduate from law school. After serving in the United States Army during World War I, Reed emerged as a prominent corporate attorney and took positions with the Federal Farm Board and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
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Walter Nelles
1883 - 1937 (54 years)
Walter Nelles was an American lawyer and law professor. Nelles is best remembered as the co-founder and first chief legal counsel of the National Civil Liberties Bureau and its successor, the American Civil Liberties Union. In this connection, Nelles achieved public notice for his legal work on behalf of pacifists charged with violating the Espionage Act during World War I and in other politically charged civil rights and constitutional law cases in later years.
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Niceto Alcalá-Zamora
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Niceto Alcalá-Zamora y Torres was a Spanish lawyer and politician who served, briefly, as the first prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic, and then—from 1931 to 1936—as its president. Early life Alcalá-Zamora was born on 6 July 1877 in Priego de Cordoba, son of Manuel Alcalá-Zamora y Caracuel and Francisca Torres y del Castillo. His mother died when Niceto was three years old.
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Frede Castberg
1893 - 1977 (84 years)
Frede Castberg was a Norwegian jurist. The son of Johan Castberg, he served as professor and rector at the University of Oslo as well as president of The Hague Academy of International Law. Personal life Frede Castberg was born in Vardal as the son of jurist and politician Johan Castberg and his wife Karen Cathrine Anker . He was the paternal great-grandson of priest and politician Peter Hersleb Harboe Castberg, grandson of customs surveyor and politician Johan Christian Tandberg Castberg, nephew of violinist Torgrim Castberg and first cousin of illustrator Johan Christian Castberg. On the m...
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John Millar
1735 - 1801 (66 years)
John Millar of Glasgow was a Scottish philosopher, historian and Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow from 1761 to 1800. Biography Born a son of the manse of the Kirk o' Shotts, Shotts, Lanarkshire, John Millar was educated by an uncle and then on his father being transferred to the parish of Hamilton, at the Old Grammar School of Hamilton Continuing his studies at the University of Glasgow, he became one of the most important followers of Adam Smith, the founder of economic science. For a short time in the 1750s he was tutor in the household of Henry Home, Lord Kames. In 1760 he was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates.
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Arthur Baumgarten
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Arthur Edwin Paul Baumgarten was a German-Swiss jurist and legal philosopher. After voluntary exile in Switzerland, Baumgarten became a prominent legal scholar in East Germany. Biography Baumgarten was born on 31 March 1884 in Königsberg, East Prussia, a son of the anatomist and bacteriologist Paul Baumgarten. He visited the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Tübingen, where he graduated in 1902, and went on to study jurisprudence in Tübingen, Geneva and Leipzig.
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Eduardo Frei Montalva
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Eduardo Nicanor Frei Montalva was a Chilean political leader. In his long political career, he was Minister of Public Works, president of his Christian Democratic Party, senator, President of the Senate, and the 27th president of Chile from 1964 to 1970. His eldest son, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, also became president of Chile .
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Hans Frank
1900 - 1946 (46 years)
Hans Michael Frank was a German politician, war criminal and lawyer who served as head of the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War. Frank was an early member of the German Workers' Party , the precursor of the Nazi Party . He took part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, and later became Adolf Hitler's personal legal adviser as well as the lawyer of the NSDAP. In June 1933, he was named as a of the party. In December 1934, Frank joined the Hitler Cabinet as a Reichsminister without portfolio.
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Johann Georg Weishaupt
1716 - 1753 (37 years)
Johann Georg Weishaupt was a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Weishaupt was born in Brilon in the Prussian government district of Arnsberg in Westphalia. He studied law in the University of Würzburg under Johann Adam von Ickstatt . He received a doctorate in law in 1743 and began to teach at the university. His dissertation was on Dissertatio Juris Publici Universalis De Summo Imperio Atque Inde Descendente Jure, Obligatione, & Potestate.
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Thomas E. Watson
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Thomas Edward Watson was an American Populist and white supremacist politician, attorney, newspaper editor, and writer from Georgia. In the 1890s Watson championed poor farmers as a leader of the Populist Party, articulating an agrarian political viewpoint while attacking business, bankers, railroads, Democratic President Grover Cleveland, and the Democratic Party. He was the nominee for vice president with Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 on the Populist ticket.
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Arthur Berriedale Keith
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Arthur Berriedale Keith was a Scottish constitutional lawyer, scholar of Sanskrit and Indologist. He became Regius Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology and Lecturer on the Constitution of the British Empire in the University of Edinburgh. He served in this role from 1914 to 1944.
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Daniel Nettelbladt
1719 - 1791 (72 years)
Daniel Nettelbladt was a German jurist and philosopher. Nettelbladt studied theology and law at the universities of Rostock, Marburg and Halle, where he became a doctor of law in 1744. In 1746 he became a full professor of jurisprudence in Halle, and a royal Prussian privy aulic councillor.
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Motilal Nehru
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Motilal Nehru was an Indian lawyer, activist, and politician affiliated with the Indian National Congress. He served as the Congress President twice, from 1919 to 1920 and from 1928 to 1929. He was a patriarch of the Nehru-Gandhi family and the father of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister.
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John Holt
1642 - 1710 (68 years)
Sir John Holt was an English lawyer who served as Lord Chief Justice of England from 17 April 1689 to his death. He is frequently credited with playing a major role in ending the prosecution of witches in English law.
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Stanley Alexander de Smith
1922 - 1974 (52 years)
Stanley Alexander de Smith FBA was an English academic lawyer and author. Biography De Smith was born in London and educated at Southend High School and St Catharine's College, Cambridge ; he received his doctorate from the University of London in 1959. After distinguished war service with the Royal Artillery—during which he was mentioned in despatches and awarded the Order of Leopold II and the Croix de Guerre with palms—he taught from 1946 at the London School of Economics, University of London, successively as Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer, Reader and as Professor of Public Law. He taught...
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William Prynne
1600 - 1669 (69 years)
William Prynne , an English lawyer, voluble author, polemicist and political figure, was a prominent Puritan opponent of church policy under William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury . His views were Presbyterian, but he became known in the 1640s as an Erastian, arguing for overall state control of religious matters.
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Edward Henry Strobel
1855 - 1908 (53 years)
Edward Henry Strobel was a United States diplomat and a scholar in international law. Strobel was born in Charleston, South Carolina on December 7, 1855. He was educated at Harvard College and at Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1883. In 1885 he was appointed Secretary of the Legation of the United States to Spain, serving until 1890.
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Wolfgang Kunkel
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Wolfgang Kunkel was a prominent German historian of Roman law, who stressed the importance of Roman social history in understanding Roman law and institutions. Born in Fürth, Germany, Kunkel studied law and history at the Goethe University Frankfurt, the University of Giessen, and the University of Berlin. He received his doctorate in 1924 at the University of Freiburg and his Habilitation in 1926 . In 1929, Kunkel accepted a position as Professor at the University of Göttingen. There he worked with the prominent classical scholars Eduard Fraenkel, Hermann Frankel, and Kurt Latte. When those ...
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Pepo
1050 - Present (976 years)
Pepo was an 11th-century consultant judge who became the first law teacher at the University of Bologna. His teaching was based on Justinian's compilations of Roman law, including the Code, Institutes, and Digest.
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Domingo de Soto
1494 - 1560 (66 years)
Domingo de Soto, O.P. was a Spanish Dominican priest and Scholastic theologian born in Segovia , and died in Salamanca , at the age of 66. He is best known as one of the founders of international law and of the Spanish Thomistic philosophical and theological movement known as the School of Salamanca.
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Owen Hood Phillips
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Owen Hood Phillips, QC was a British jurist. He was Lady Barber Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Birmingham and Dean of the Faculty of Law, Vice-Principal and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of that university.
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Victor Nunes Leal
1914 - 1985 (71 years)
Victor Nunes Leal was a Brazilian jurist, Minister of the Supreme Federal Court and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro . He graduated from the National Faculty of Law of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, then known as the University of Brazil, in 1936.
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Robert Lee Hale
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
Robert Lee Hale was an American lawyer and economist. He earned an economics degree at Harvard University, and then worked at Columbia Law School. He is known as a legal realist, and his work focused particularly on the distributive impact of legal rules.
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Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina
1664 - 1718 (54 years)
Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina was an Italian man of letters and jurist. He was born at Roggiano Gravina, a small town near Cosenza, in Calabria. He was the adoptive father of the poet Metastasio. Biography Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina was born at Roggiano a small town near Cosenza, to a well-off family. He was early sent to study with his maternal uncle, Gregorio Caloprese, who possessed some reputation as a poet and philosopher. This was a decisive experience in his education: his tutor not only guided him toward knowledge of the classics, but also exposed him to the methods and perspectives of “ne...
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Matthias Calonius
1737 - 1817 (80 years)
Matthias Calonius was Finland's most renowned jurist. Born in Saarijärvi as a pastor's son, he studied at the Royal Academy of Turku. He went on to become a lecturer and then full professor at the Faculty of Law there, despite being too poor and lacking in family connections to ever obtain an academic title. He was also a member of the Supreme Court of Sweden in Stockholm and, after the Finnish War and Diet of Porvoo, procurator with the Senate of the Grand Duchy of Finland.
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Thomas Smith
1915 - 1988 (73 years)
Sir Thomas Broun Smith was a British lawyer, soldier and academic. Life Smith was the son of John Smith, DL, JP, of Glasgow and his wife, Agnes McFarlane. He was educated at Glasgow High School and Sedbergh School in Yorkshire.
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Karl von Amira
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Karl Konrad Ferdinand Maria von Amira was a German jurist who served as Professor of Constitutional Law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He was a known expert on early Germanic law. Biography Karl von Amira was born in Aschaffenburg, Germany on 8 March 1848. Gaining his abitur at the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich, von Amira studied law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Among his teachers were Bernhard Windscheid, Julius Wilhelm von Planck, and Alois von Brinz. He also studied North Germanic languages under Konrad Maurer. von Amira gained his Ph.D. at Munich in 1872 u...
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Oliver Mowat
1820 - 1903 (83 years)
Sir Oliver Mowat was a Canadian lawyer, politician, and Ontario Liberal Party leader. He served for nearly 24 years as the third premier of Ontario. He was the eighth lieutenant governor of Ontario and one of the Fathers of Confederation. He is best known for defending successfully the constitutional rights of the provinces in the face of the centralizing tendency of the national government as represented by his longtime Conservative adversary, John A. Macdonald. This longevity and power was due to his maneuvering to build a political base around Liberals, Catholics, trade unions, and anti-F...
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Dmitri Kachenovsky
1827 - 1872 (45 years)
Dmitri Ivanovich Kachenovsky was a famous Russian jurist. He taught law at the University of Kharkiv, where he influenced Maksim Kovalevsky and other liberal political figures. He is known for being one of the first international lawyers to call for the codification of international law, leading to the Paris Declaration of 1856.
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George Ticknor
1791 - 1871 (80 years)
George Ticknor was an American academician and Hispanist, specializing in the subject areas of languages and literature. He is known for his scholarly work on the history and criticism of Spanish literature.
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Gian Domenico Romagnosi
1761 - 1835 (74 years)
Gian Domenico Romagnosi was an Italian philosopher, economist and jurist. Biography Gian Domenico Romagnosi was born in Salsomaggiore Terme. He studied law at the University of Parma from 1782 to 1786. In 1791 he became the chief civil magistrate of Trento. In the late 18th and early 19th century Trento was successively under the rule of France, Italy and Austria. In 1799 Romagnosi was arrested in Innsbruck during fifteen months by the Austrians on account of his alleged sympathy with the French, but he was acquitted. In 1801 the French occupied Trento, and he was raised to the position of Secretary of the Higher Council.
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Theodore William Dwight
1822 - 1892 (70 years)
Theodore William Dwight was an American jurist and educator, cousin of Theodore Dwight Woolsey and of Timothy Dwight V. Biography Theodore William Dwight was born in Catskill, New York on July 18, 1822. His father was Benjamin Woolsey Dwight , a physician and merchant, and his grandfather was Timothy Dwight IV , a prominent theologian, educator, author, and president of Yale University from 1795-1817. Theodore Dwight graduated from Hamilton College in 1840. He also later studied physics under Samuel F.B. Morse and John William Draper.
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Georges Burdeau
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Georges Burdeau was a French constitutionalist.
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James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce
1838 - 1922 (84 years)
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, , was a British academic, jurist, historian, and Liberal politician. According to Keoth Robbins, he was a widely traveled authority on law, government, and history whose expertise led to high political offices culminating with his successful role as ambassador to the United States, 1907–13. His intellectual influence was greatest in The American Commonwealth , an in-depth study of American politics that shaped the understanding of America in Britain and in the United States as well.
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Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
1864 - 1958 (94 years)
Edgar Algernon Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, , known as Lord Robert Cecil from 1868 to 1923, was a British lawyer, politician and diplomat. He was one of the architects of the League of Nations and a defender of it, whose service to the organisation saw him awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937.
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Paul Krüger
1840 - 1926 (86 years)
Paul Krüger was a German jurist. Biography He was born in Berlin, where he studied jurisprudence . In 1863, he began to lecture on Roman law at the University of Berlin. In 1870, he became an associate professor of law at the University of Marburg, where he attained a full professorship during the following year. Afterwards, he served as a professor at the universities of Innsbruck , Königsberg and Bonn .
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Contardo Ferrini
1859 - 1902 (43 years)
Contardo Ferrini was a noted Italian jurist and legal scholar. He was also a fervent Roman Catholic, who lived a devout life of prayer and service to the poor. He has been beatified by the Catholic Church.
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Sheldon Amos
1835 - 1886 (51 years)
Sheldon Amos was an English jurist. Life and career Sheldon Amos was born in St Pancras, London, the son of lawyer Andrew Amos and his wife, Margaret. He was educated at Clare College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar as a member of the Middle Temple in 1862. He was invited by F. D. Maurice to teach at The Working Men's College, with fellow Cambridge graduates and friends Richard Chevenix Trench and J. R. Seeley. In 1869 he was appointed to the chair of jurisprudence in University College, London, and in 1872 became reader under the council of legal education and examiner in constitutional law and history to the University of London.
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David Derham
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Sir David Plumley Derham was an Australian jurist and university administrator. He was an expert in Australian constitutional law. In 1963, he became the Foundation Dean of Monash University Law School, which is now called the David Derham School of Law in his honour.
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Edward Jenks
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Edward Jenks, FBA was an English jurist, and noted writer on law and its place in history. Born on 20 February 1861 in Lambeth, London, to Robert Jenks, upholsterer, and his wife Frances Sarah, née Jones, he was educated at Dulwich College and King's College, Cambridge, where he was scholar and, in 1889-95, fellow. He graduated B.A., LL.B. in 1886, and M.A. in 1890. He was awarded the Le Bas Prize and the Thirlwall Prize and was chancellor's medallist. In 1887 he was called to the Bar and for the next two years lectured at Pembroke and Jesus colleges, Cambridge.
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Jacob Israël de Haan
1881 - 1924 (43 years)
Jacob Israël de Haan was a Dutch Jewish literary writer, lawyer and journalist who immigrated to Palestine in 1919, and was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1924 by the Zionist paramilitary organization Haganah for his anti-Zionist political activities.
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Emma Gillett
1852 - 1927 (75 years)
Emma Millinda Gillett was an American lawyer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the advancement of legal studies for women. After local law schools refused to admit her because of her sex, she was admitted by Howard University, an historically black university. Yet the Washington College of Law, which she founded in 1898, did not accept people of color until 1950.
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Royall Tyler
1757 - 1826 (69 years)
Royall Tyler was an American jurist and playwright. He was born in Boston, graduated from Harvard University in 1776, and then served in the Massachusetts militia during the American Revolution. He was admitted to the bar in 1780, became a lawyer, and fathered eleven children. In 1801, he was appointed a Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court. He wrote a play, The Contrast, which was produced in 1787 in New York City, shortly after George Washington's inauguration. It is considered the first American comedy. Washington attended the production, which was well-received, and Tyler became a li...
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John Blair Jr.
1732 - 1800 (68 years)
John Blair Jr. was an American Founding Father, who signed the United States Constitution as a delegate from Virginia and was appointed an Associate Justice on the first U.S. Supreme Court by George Washington.
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Zaccaria Giacometti
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Zaccaria Giacometti was a Swiss scholar of constitutional law and professor at the University of Zurich. Biography Early life in the giacometti artist family Zaccaria Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia to Zaccaria Giacometti, Sr. and Cornelia Stampa . Orphaned at the age of 12, Zaccaria and his older brother Cornelio spent much of their childhood in the household of their aunt Anetta, and were raised as „older brothers“, so to speak, to their cousins Alberto Giacometti , Diego Giacometti , and Bruno Giacometti . After visiting boarding scho...
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Pehr Evind Svinhufvud
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Pehr Evind Svinhufvud af Qvalstad was the third president of Finland from 1931 to 1937. Serving as a lawyer, judge, and politician in the Grand Duchy of Finland, which was at that time an autonomous state within the Russian Empire, Svinhufvud played a major role in the movement for Finnish independence. He was the one who presented the Declaration of Independence to the Parliament.
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Lady Amin
1886 - 1983 (97 years)
Hajiyeh Seyyedeh Nosrat Begum Amin, also known as Banu Amin, Lady Amin , was Iran's most outstanding female jurisprudent, theologian and great Muslim mystic of the 20th century, a Lady Mujtahideh. She received numerous ijazahs of ijtihad, among them from Ayatollahs Muḥammad Kazim Ḥusayni Shīrāzī and Grand Ayatullah ‘arif , the founder of the Qom seminaries . She also granted numerous ijazahs of ijtihad to female and male scholars, among them Sayyid Mar'ashi Najafi.
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Andrea Alciato
1492 - 1550 (58 years)
Andrea Alciato , commonly known as Alciati , was an Italian jurist and writer. He is regarded as the founder of the French school of legal humanists. Biography Alciati was born in Alzate Brianza, near Milan, and settled in France in the early 16th century. He displayed great literary skill in his exposition of the laws, and was one of the first to interpret the civil law by the history, languages and literature of antiquity, and to substitute original research for the servile interpretations of the glossators. He published many legal works, and some annotations on Tacitus and accumulated a s...
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Franciscus Accursius
1225 - 1293 (68 years)
Franciscus Accursius was an Italian lawyer, the son of the celebrated jurist and glossator Accursius. The two are often confused. Born in Bologna, Franciscus was more distinguished for his tact than for his wisdom. Edward I of England, returning from Palestine, brought him with him to England. The king invited him to Oxford, and he lived in the former Beaumont Palace, , in Oxford.
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