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,
#4101
Richard Henry Lee
1732 - 1794 (62 years)
Richard Henry Lee was an American statesman and Founding Father from Virginia, best known for the June 1776 Lee Resolution, the motion in the Second Continental Congress calling for the colonies' independence from Great Britain leading to the United States Declaration of Independence, which he signed. Lee also served a one-year term as the president of the Continental Congress, was a signatory to the Continental Association and the Articles of Confederation, and was a United States Senator from Virginia from 1789 to 1792, serving part of that time as the second president pro tempore of the up...
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Henri Donnedieu de Vabres
1880 - 1952 (72 years)
Henri Donnedieu de Vabres was a French jurist who took part in the Nuremberg trials after World War II and a president of the AIDP. He was the primary French judge during the proceedings, with Robert Falco as his alternate.
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Manuel L. Quezon
1878 - 1944 (66 years)
Manuel Luis Quezon Antonio y Molina , also known by his initials MLQ, was a Filipino lawyer, statesman, soldier, and politician who was president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 until his death in 1944. He was the first Filipino to head a government of the entire Philippines and is considered the second president of the Philippines after Emilio Aguinaldo , whom Quezon defeated in the 1935 presidential election.
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Mario de la Cueva
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Mario de la Cueva y de la Rosa was a Mexican jurist and rector of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1940–1942. De la Cueva studied law at the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia of the UNAM, as well as at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. From 1929 to 1961, he taught constitutional law and labour law at the UNAM, where he received several academic honours.
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Gaston Jèze
1869 - 1953 (84 years)
Gaston Jèze was a French academic, humanitarian and human rights activist. He was a professor of public law and the resident of the International Law Institute. During the 1930s, he served as legal counsel to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, who had been deposed and exiled by the Italian Fascists. During World War II, he spoke out against the persecution of Jews and other minorities by Vichy France.
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Leo Rosenberg
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Leo Rosenberg was a German jurist, a professor in Göttingen, Giessen, and Leipzig. In 1934 he was barred as Jew but managed to survive Hitler's regime. After World War II he lectured at the University of Munich until his retirement in 1956. Rosenberg's two-volume manual on civil procedural law remains a standard reference.
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Aron Trainin
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Aron Naumovich Trainin Moshe Aron Naumovich Trainin Moshe Aron Nahimovich Trainin was a Soviet jurist and criminologist. Trainin attended the of Kaluga, graduating in 1903, the same year he matriculated to Moscow State University , whence he graduated in 1908. At university he participated in the , student activist movement, during the pivotal, though failed, 1905 Russian Revolution.
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Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
1746 - 1825 (79 years)
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was an American statesman, military officer and Founding Father who served as United States Minister to France from 1796 to 1797. A delegate to the Constitutional Convention where he signed the Constitution of the United States, Pinckney was twice nominated by the Federalist Party as its presidential candidate in 1804 and 1808, losing both elections.
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Jan Smuts
1870 - 1950 (80 years)
Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, was a South African statesman, military leader and philosopher. In addition to holding various military and cabinet posts, he served as prime minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and 1939 to 1948.
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Max Huber
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
Hans Max Huber was a Swiss lawyer and diplomat who represented Switzerland at a series of international conferences and institutions. He studied law at the Universities of Lausanne, Zurich and Berlin. Huber taught international, constitutional and canon law at the University of Zurich from 1902 to 1914, and retained this title until 1921 but could not teach due to World War I. During the War, he advised the Swiss Defence and Foreign Affairs ministries. From 1922 to 1939 he was a Judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice and he served as the Court's President from 1925 to 1927, and from 1928 to 1944 he was president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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Theodor Kipp
1862 - 1931 (69 years)
Louis Theodor Kipp was a German jurist who is perhaps best known for his theory of "double nullity", under which a null contract can be challenged in some circumstances. He also made important contributions to family law and inheritance law.
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Albert Mosse
1846 - 1925 (79 years)
Isaac Albert Mosse was a German judge and legal scholar. Mosse's importance lies in his work on Japan's Meiji Constitution and his continuation of Litthauer's Comments on the German Commercial Code.
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Karl Friedrich Eichhorn
1781 - 1854 (73 years)
Karl Friedrich Eichhorn was a German jurist. Eichhorn was born in Jena as the son of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. He entered the University of Göttingen in 1797. In 1805 he obtained the professorship of law at Frankfurt , holding it until 1811, when he accepted the same chair at the new Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. On the call to arms in 1813 he became a captain of horse, and received the Iron Cross at the end of the war.
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Philipp Heck
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Philipp Heck was a German jurist and a leading proponent of the doctrine of jurisprudence of interests. After studies in Berlin, he taught law since 1891 at the University of Greifswald, since 1892 at the University of Halle and from 1901 until 1928 at the University of Tübingen. His work on judicial methodology was highly influential in helping to establish the doctrine of jurisprudence of interests, which he often polemically defended against the opposing schools of free law and the jurisprudence of concepts. Under National Socialist rule, Heck attempted to gain favor with the regime by us...
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Johannes Althusius
1557 - 1638 (81 years)
Johannes Althusius was a German-French jurist and Calvinist political philosopher. He is best known for his 1603 work, "Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata". revised editions were published in 1610 and 1614. The ideas expressed therein relate to the early development of federalism in the 16th and 17th centuries and the construction of subsidiarity.
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Thomas Erskine Holland
1835 - 1926 (91 years)
Sir Thomas Erskine Holland KC, FBA was a British jurist. Biography After school at Brighton College and studies at Oxford, he practiced law as a barrister from 1863 onwards. In 1874, he returned to Oxford, succeeding William Blackstone as Vinerian Reader. Later, he became professor of international law and fellow of All Souls College.
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Simon Greenleaf
1783 - 1853 (70 years)
Simon Greenleaf , was an American lawyer and jurist. He was born at Newburyport, Massachusetts before moving to New Gloucester where he was admitted to the Cumberland County bar. Early life and legal career Greenleaf's family traces its ancestry back to Edmund Greenleaf, who lived in Ipswich, Suffolk in England before emigrating and settling in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The Greenleaf family flourished in this part of Massachusetts for almost 150 years prior to Simon's birth in 1783. Simon's father, Moses Greenleaf, married Lydia Parsons, daughter of Rev. Jonathan Parsons of Newburyport. The...
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Rudolph Cleveringa
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
Rudolph Pabus Cleveringa was a professor of law at Leiden University. He is known for his speech of 26 November 1940, in which he protested against the dismissal of Jewish colleagues ordered by the German occupation authorities.
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Champ Clark
1850 - 1921 (71 years)
James Beauchamp Clark was an American politician and attorney who represented Missouri in the United States House of Representatives for thirteen terms between 1893 and 1921 and served as Speaker of the House from 1911 to 1919.
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Sergio Osmeña
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Sergio Osmeña Sr. was a Filipino lawyer and politician who served as the fourth president of the Philippines from 1944 to 1946. He was vice president under Manuel L. Quezon. Upon Quezon's sudden death in 1944, Osmeña succeeded him at age 65, becoming the oldest person to assume the Philippine presidency until Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016 at age 71. A founder of the Nacionalista Party, Osmeña was also the first Visayan to become president.
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Romuald Hube
1803 - 1890 (87 years)
Romuald Hube was a Polish law scholar. Romuald Hube studied in Warsaw, then listened to the lectures of Savigny, Hegel, Steffens, Boeckh, and Ritters in Berlin. In 1825 he became a lecturer of general legal history at the University of Warsaw. In 1829 he became a full professor of canonical and criminal law at the university, while his brother Joseph Hube at the same time assumed the chair of the department of legal history.
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Gottfried Achenwall
1719 - 1772 (53 years)
Gottfried Achenwall was a German philosopher, historian, economist, jurist and statistician. He is counted among the inventors of statistics. Biography Achenwall was born in Elbing in the Polish province of Royal Prussia. Beginning in 1738 he studied in the Jena, Halle, again Jena and Leipzig. In the years 1743 to 1746, he worked as controller in Dresden. He was awarded his master's degree in 1746 by the philosophical faculty of Leipzig and went in the following to Marburg to work as assistant professor lecturing history, statistics, natural and international law. In 1748 he was called to th...
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John Forrest Dillon
1831 - 1914 (83 years)
John Forrest Dillon was an American attorney in Iowa and New York, a justice of the Iowa Supreme Court and a United States circuit judge of the United States Circuit Court for the Eighth Circuit. He authored a highly influential treatise on the power of states over municipal governments.
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Hermann Kantorowicz
1877 - 1940 (63 years)
Hermann Ulrich Kantorowicz was a German jurist. He was a professor at Freiburg University , and a visiting professor, Columbia University , as well as at Kiel University . He was dismissed from Kiel on political and antisemitic grounds in 1933, and became lecturer at the 'University in Exile' and at City College, New York, 1933–34. Then he was lecturer at the London School of Economics, All Souls College Oxford and Cambridge University, 1934–37, and Assistant Director of Research in Law, Cambridge, 1937-1940.
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Paul Laband
1838 - 1918 (80 years)
Paul Laband was a German jurist and the German Empire's leading scholar of constitutional law. Life and work Labant was born into a Jewish family and converted to Christianity in 1857. He studied law at Breslau, Heidelberg and Berlin, and obtained his habilitation in Heidelberg in 1861. He was called to teach at Königsberg in 1864, and at Strasbourg in 1872, where he taught until his retirement. The Imperial government appointed him as councillor of state of Alsace-Lorraine in 1879 and as a member of that state's legislature in 1911. He was a signatory of the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three tha...
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Lorenz von Stein
1815 - 1890 (75 years)
Lorenz von Stein was a German economist, sociologist, and public administration scholar from Eckernförde. As an advisor to Meiji period Japan, his liberal political views influenced the wording of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan as well as major constitutional thinkers such as Rudolf von Gneist.
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St. George Tucker
1752 - 1827 (75 years)
St. George Tucker was a Bermudian-born American lawyer, military officer and professor who taught law at the College of William & Mary. He strengthened the requirements for a law degree at the college, as he believed lawyers needed deep educations. He served as a judge of the General Court of Virginia and later on the Court of Appeals.
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Joseph de Maistre
1753 - 1821 (68 years)
Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre was a Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat who advocated social hierarchy and monarchy in the period immediately following the French Revolution. Despite his close personal and intellectual ties with France, Maistre was throughout his life a subject of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which he served as a member of the Savoy Senate , ambassador to Russia , and minister of state to the court in Turin .
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Hans Gross
1847 - 1915 (68 years)
Hans Gustav Adolf Gross or Groß was an Austrian criminal jurist and criminologist, the "Founding Father" of criminal profiling. A criminal jurist, Gross made a mark as the creator of the field of criminality. Throughout his life, Hans Gross made significant contributions to the realm of scientific criminology. As Gross developed in his career as an examining justice, he noticed the failings of the field of law. His book, classes, institutions, and methods helped improve the justice system through his experience as a justice.
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John J. Crittenden
1787 - 1863 (76 years)
John Jordan Crittenden was an American statesman and politician from the U.S. state of Kentucky. He represented the state in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and twice served as United States Attorney General in the administrations of William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. He was also the 17th governor of Kentucky and served in the state legislature. Although frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the U.S. presidency, he never consented to run for the office.
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Andreas Aagesen
1826 - 1879 (53 years)
Andreas Aagesen was a Danish jurist. Biography Aagesen was educated for the law at Christianshavn and Copenhagen, and interrupted his studies in 1848 to take part in the First Schleswig War, in which he served as the leader of a reserve battalion.
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Raymond Poincaré
1860 - 1934 (74 years)
Raymond Nicolas Landry Poincaré was a French statesman who served as President of France from 1913 to 1920, and three times as Prime Minister of France. Trained in law, Poincaré was elected deputy in 1887 and served in the cabinets of Dupuy and Ribot. In 1902, he co-founded the Democratic Republican Alliance, the most important centre-right party under the Third Republic, becoming Prime Minister in 1912 and serving as President of the Republic from 1913 to 1920. He purged the French government of all opponents and critics and single-handedly controlled French foreign policy from 1912 to the beginning of World War I.
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John Bell
1796 - 1869 (73 years)
John Bell was an American politician, attorney, and planter who was a candidate for President of the United States in the election of 1860. One of Tennessee's most prominent antebellum politicians, Bell served in the House of Representatives from 1827 to 1841, and in the Senate from 1847 to 1859. He was Speaker of the House for the 23rd Congress , and briefly served as Secretary of War during the administration of William Henry Harrison . In 1860, he ran for president as the candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, a third party which took a neutral stance on the issue of slavery. and w...
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Nagao Ariga
1860 - 1921 (61 years)
Nagao Ariga also spelled Nagao Aruga was a Japanese legal expert during the Meiji period. In addition to law, he also studied sociology at Tokyo Imperial University. During the Sino-Japanese war, he advised Field-Marshall Ōyama Iwao on issues of international law. In 1913 he accepted the invitation by Yuan Shikai, to prepare a draft constitution for the new Chinese republic, together with . Ariga doubted that China was ready to implement a liberal democracy and recommended a balance between monarchy and republic.
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Azo of Bologna
1150 - 1225 (75 years)
Azo of Bologna or Azzo or Azolenus was an influential Italian jurist and a member of the school of the so-called glossators. Born circa 1150 in Bologna, Azo studied under Joannes Bassianus and became professor of civil law at Bologna. He was a teacher of Franciscus Accursius. He is sometimes known as Azo Soldanus, from his father's surname, and also Azzo Porcius , to distinguish him from later famous Italians named Azzo. He died circa 1230.
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Felix Kaufmann
1895 - 1949 (54 years)
Felix Kaufmann was an Austrian-American philosopher of law. Biography Kaufmann studied jurisprudence and philosophy in Vienna. He became part of the legal-philosophical school of Hans Kelsen. From 1922 to 1938 he was a Privatdozent at the University of Vienna. During this time Kaufmann was associated with the Vienna Circle. He also wrote on the foundations of mathematics where, along with Hermann Weyl and Oskar Becker, he was attempting to apply the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl to constructive mathematics.
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Joseph Louis Elzéar Ortolan
1802 - 1873 (71 years)
Joseph Louis Elzéar Ortolan was a French jurist. Life He was born at Toulon, studied law at Aix-en-Provence and Paris, and early made his name by two volumes, Explication historique des institutes de Justinien , and Histoire de la legislation romaine , the first of which has been frequently republished. He was made assistant librarian to the Court of Cassation, and was promoted after the Revolution of 1830 to be secretary-general.
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Ume Kenjirō
1860 - 1910 (50 years)
Ume Kenjirō was a legal scholar in Meiji period Japan, and a founder of Hosei University. Life and career Ume was born the second son of the domain doctor of Matsue domain, Izumo Province . He was sent to study French at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and upon graduation was employed by the Ministry of Justice. He also taught at Tokyo Imperial University. Ume was sent by the government for advanced studies to the University of Lyon in France in 1886, completing his studies in 1889. After an additional year of study at the Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany, he returned to Japan in 1890.
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Cornelis van Vollenhoven
1874 - 1933 (59 years)
Cornelis van Vollenhoven was a Dutch law professor and legal scholar, best known for his work on the legal systems of the East Indies. Cornelis van Vollenhoven began his university studies at Leiden at the age of 17, where he would earn many degrees, including: a master's in law , a bachelor's degree in Semitic languages , a master's in political science , and finally his PhD in law and political science . He received a cum laude for his thesis, “Scope and content of international law” , which foreshadows his later focus on the laws of Southeast Asia.
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Mineichirō Adachi
1870 - 1934 (64 years)
Mineichirō Adachi was a Japanese legal expert and President of the Permanent Court of International Justice at the Hague from 1931 until 1934. Early life Adachi was born in what is now the town of Yamanobe, Yamagata, Japan. In 1892, he graduated from the law school of Tokyo University, and began his legal and diplomatic career.
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Nicolás Avellaneda
1837 - 1885 (48 years)
Nicolás Remigio Aurelio Avellaneda Silva was an Argentine politician and journalist, and President of Argentina from 1874 to 1880. Avellaneda's main projects while in office were banking and education reform, leading to Argentina's economic growth. The most important events of his government were the Conquest of the Desert and the transformation of the Buenos Aires into a federal district.
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Ashutosh Mukherjee
1864 - 1924 (60 years)
Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee was a prolific Bengali educator, jurist, barrister and mathematician. He was the first student to be awarded a dual degree from Calcutta University. Perhaps the most emphatic figure of Indian education, he was a man of great personality, high self-respect, courage and towering administrative ability. The second Indian Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta for four consecutive two-year terms and a fifth two-year term , Mukherjee was responsible for the foundation of the Bengal Technical Institute in 1906, which was later known as Jadavpur University and the U...
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Paul Reynaud
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
Paul Reynaud was a French politician and lawyer prominent in the interwar period, noted for his stances on economic liberalism and militant opposition to Nazi Germany. Reynaud opposed the Munich Agreement of September 1938, when France and the United Kingdom gave way before Hitler's proposals for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. After the outbreak of World War II Reynaud became the penultimate Prime Minister of the Third Republic in March 1940. He was also vice-president of the Democratic Republican Alliance center-right party. Reynaud was Prime Minister during the German defeat of Franc...
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William Draper Lewis
1867 - 1949 (82 years)
William Draper Lewis was the first full-time dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School , and the founding director of the American Law Institute. Personal life and education William Draper Lewis was reported by the Pennsylvania Law Review as being a devout Episcopalian born to Quaker parents, Henry and Fannie Hannah Wilson Lewis, in Philadelphia, in 1867. Lewis was the great-grandson of Simeon Draper, and a descendant of James Draper, an early settler of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He also descended from Puritan pioneer George Lewes , an early settler at Plymouth Colony; the clothi...
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Louis Renault
1843 - 1918 (75 years)
Louis Renault was a French jurist and educator, and the co-winner in 1907 of the Nobel Prize for Peace. Renault was born at Autun. From 1868 to 1873, Renault was professor of Roman and commercial law at the University of Dijon. From 1873 until his death, he was professor in the faculty of law at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and the University of Paris, where in 1881 he became professor of international law. In 1890, he was appointed jurisconsult of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a post created for him in which he scrutinized French foreign policy in the light of international law.
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James Brown Scott
1866 - 1943 (77 years)
James Brown Scott, J.U.D. was an American authority on international law. Early life Scott was born at Kincardine, Canada West. He was educated at Harvard University . As Parker fellow of Harvard he traveled in Europe and studied in Berlin, Heidelberg , and Paris.
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Madison Grant
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
Madison Grant was an American lawyer, zoologist, anthropologist, and writer known for his work as a conservationist, eugenicist, and advocate of scientific racism. Grant is less noted for his far-reaching achievements in conservation than for his pseudoscientific advocacy of Nordicism, a form of racism which views the "Nordic race" as superior.
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John Fortescue
1394 - 1476 (82 years)
Sir John Fortescue , of Ebrington in Gloucestershire, was Chief Justice of the King's Bench and was the author of De Laudibus Legum Angliae , first published posthumously circa 1543, an influential treatise on English law. In the course of Henry VI's reign, Fortescue was appointed one of the governors of Lincoln's Inn three times and served as a Member of Parliament from 1421 to 1437. He became one of the King's Serjeants during the Easter term of 1441, and subsequently served as Chief Justice of the King's Bench from 25 January 1442 to Easter term 1460.
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Dean Acheson
1893 - 1971 (78 years)
Dean Gooderham Acheson was an American statesman and lawyer. As the 51st U.S. Secretary of State, he set the foreign policy of the Harry S. Truman administration from 1949 to 1953. He was also Truman's main foreign policy advisor from 1945 to 1947, especially regarding the Cold War. Acheson helped design the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He was in private law practice from July 1947 to December 1948. After 1949 Acheson came under partisan political attack from Republicans led by Senator Joseph McCarthy over Truman's policy toward the...
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Baldus de Ubaldis
1327 - 1400 (73 years)
Baldus de Ubaldis was an Italian jurist, and a leading figure in Medieval Roman Law and the school of Postglossators. Life A member of the noble family of the Ubaldi , Baldus was born at Perugia in 1327, and studied civil law there under Bartolus de Saxoferrato, being admitted to the degree of doctor of civil law at the early age of seventeen. Federicus Petrucius of Siena is said to have been the master under whom he studied canon law.
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