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
John Simpson
John Simpson was a United States Army officer, attorney, and politician. Simpson saw military action in both the Northwest Indian War and the War of 1812. He also served 4 terms in the Kentucky House of Representatives including 2 years as the House's Speaker. In 1812 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives but died before he could take office.
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James Thompson
1806 - 1874 (68 years)
James Thompson was a lawyer, politician and jurist from Pennsylvania. He served in the United States Congress and in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he was Speaker in 1835. He also served as a federal judge and as a member of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
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Jack Cassidy
1927 - 1976 (49 years)
John Joseph Edward Cassidy was an American actor, singer and theater director known for his work in the theater, television and films. He received multiple Tony Award nominations and a win, as well as a Grammy Award, for his work on the Broadway production of the musical She Loves Me. He also received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He was the father of teen idols David Cassidy and Shaun Cassidy.
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John James McCook
1843 - 1927 (84 years)
John James McCook, Jr. was a chaplain in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and postbellum lawyer, professor, and theologian. He was a member of the Fighting McCooks, a family of Ohioans who contributed 15 members to the Union army.
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John Lindsay of Balcarres, Lord Menmuir
1552 - 1598 (46 years)
John Lindsay of Balcarres was Secretary of State, Scotland. On 5 July 1581 he was appointed a Lord of Session under the title Lord Menmuir. Life He was the second son of David Lindsay, 9th Earl of Crawford and Catherine Campbell, daughter of Sir John Campbell of Lorn. Along with his brother, Lord Edzell, he was sent under the care of James Lawson to complete his education on the continent. The French Wars of Religion meant they had to return rapidly from Paris to Dieppe, then moving to the University of Cambridge; however, as there is no record of him in Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses John ma...
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Maddalena Buonsignori
Maddalena Buonsignori was a 14th-century law professor at the University of Bologna. Buonsignori taught jurisprudence in 1380. Around this time other women were given similar opportunities at Bologna University, however this opportunity was unique to the school. She wrote a Latin treatise, De Legibus Connubialibus, in which she explored the legal status of the women in her time from various points of view.
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Thomas Percival Creed
1897 - 1969 (72 years)
Sir Thomas Percival Creed, KBE, MC, QC was a lawyer and educationist. Principal of Queen Mary College London from 1952 to 1967, he served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1964 to 1967.
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Tsuneko Gauntlett
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Tsuneko Yamada Gauntlett , born Yamada Tsune, was a Japanese temperance, suffrage, and peace activist. In 1937 she was international president of the Pan-Pacific Women's Association. Early life Yamada Tsune was born in what is now part of the city of Anjō, Aichi, the daughter of a samurai, Yamada Kenzō. Her younger brother was composer Kosaku Yamada. She was educated at the Sakurai Girls' School, where one of her teachers was Yajima Kajiko.
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Matthew Wesenbeck
1531 - 1586 (55 years)
Matthew Wesenbeck was a Belgian jurist and a student of Gabriel Mudaeus. His Latin surname was also spelled Wesembecius or Vesembecius. Wesenbeck was a Protestant writer widely known and cited during his time. He taught at Jena and Wittenberg.
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Dietrich Flade
1534 - 1589 (55 years)
Dietrich Flade was a German lawyer, judge and educator. He was one of the most known victims of the Trier witch trials. He was active as a judge during the Trier witch trials until he himself was arrested and executed for sorcery.
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Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando
1772 - 1842 (70 years)
Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando, born Joseph Marie Degérando , was a French jurist, philanthropist and philosopher of Italian descent. He is most remembered for his 1804 book Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, considérés relativement aux principes des connaissances humaines as well as his 1820 study of benevolent activity, Le visiteur du pauvre . He influenced Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson who used his philosophical framework extensively in support of his own first book Nature.
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Georgius Merula
1430 - 1494 (64 years)
Georgius Merula was an Italian humanist and classical scholar. Life Merula was born in Alessandria in Piedmont. The greater part of his life was spent in Venice and Milan, where he held a professorship and continued to teach until his death. While he was teaching at Venice, he was the subject of a personal polemic by Cornelio Vitelli, directed at his scholarship; and Vitelli replaced him in 1483.
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Thomas H. Malone
1834 - 1906 (72 years)
Thomas H. Malone was an American Confederate veteran, judge, businessman and academic administrator. He served as the President of the Nashville Gas Company from 1893 to 1906. He served as the second Dean of the Vanderbilt University Law School from 1875 to 1904.
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W. C. J. Meredith
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
William Campbell James Meredith , often referred to as W. C. J. Meredith, was a Canadian lawyer, the author of three legal texts, and Dean of the McGill University Faculty of Law . In 1951, he was noted for the prescient hiring of John Cobb Cooper to head up the new department he created, McGill's Institute of Air Space Law.
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Onissim Goldovsky
1865 - 1922 (57 years)
Onissim Borisovich Goldovsky was a Russian attorney, political philosopher and activist, author, and champion of Jewish causes. A so-called "Westerner" influenced by ideas of the French enlightenment, he was one of the founders of the Kadet party and advocated for a constitutional democracy for Russia. Married to the author Rashel Khin, he fathered three children with the violinist Lea Luboshutz, among them the opera impresario Boris Goldovsky.
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Jacobus Balduinus
1175 - 1235 (60 years)
Jacobus Balduinus was an Italian jurist. Balduinus was born in Bologna probably about 1175, and is reputed to have been of a noble family. He was a pupil of Azo, and the master of Odofredus, of the canonist Hostiensis , and of Jacobus de Ravanis , who taught at Orléans. His great fame as a professor of civil law at the University of Bologna caused Balduinus to be elected podestà of the city of Genoa, where he was entrusted with the reforms of the law of the Genoese Republic. He died at Bologna in 1235, and has left behind him some treatises on procedure.
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George Clinton Jr.
1771 - 1809 (38 years)
George Clinton Jr. was an American politician and lawyer who served as a U.S. representative from New York from 1805 to 1809. Early life He was born in New York City on June 6, 1771, the son of Mary De Witt and James Clinton, a brevet major general in the American Revolutionary War. He was the brother of DeWitt Clinton , the 6th governor of New York, and half-brother of James Graham Clinton, also a U.S. Representative.
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Arthur A. Leeper
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Arthur A. Leeper was an American lawyer and politician. Leeper was born near Chandlerville, Cass County, Illinois. He went to the public schools. Lepper went to Eureka College and to University of Iowa College of Law. He lived in Virginia, Illinois with his wife and family. Leeper served as state's attorney for Cass County. He served in the Illinois Senate from 1889 to 1901 and was a Democrat. He died at his daughter's home in Clinton, Illinois.
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Boëtius Epo
1529 - 1599 (70 years)
Boetius Epo was a lawyer and scholar from the Low Countries. He was born at Reduzum, in Friesland, in 1529. He studied at Cologne and Leuven, and made such rapid progress in the acquisition of the learned languages, that at the age of twenty he gave public lectures on Homer. He afterwards taught, not only at Leuven but at Paris, jurisprudence, the belles-lettres, and theology, and afterwards went to Geneva with a view to inquire if the religious principles of John Calvin were worthy of the reputation they had gained. Not satisfied, however, with them, Boetius Epo returned to the Catholic Chur...
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Freeman Ransom
1884 - 1947 (63 years)
Freeman Briley Ransom was an American lawyer, businessman and civic activist in Indianapolis, Indiana. From 1910 until his death he served as legal counsel to Madam C. J. Walker and the Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. Robert Brokenburr was his law partner.
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Paul Cornell
1822 - 1904 (82 years)
Paul Cornell was an American lawyer and Chicago real estate speculator who founded the Hyde Park Township that included most of what are now known as the south and far southeast sides of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. He turned the south side Lake Michigan lakefront area, especially the Hyde Park community area and neighboring Kenwood and Woodlawn neighborhoods, into a resort community that had its heyday from the 1850s through the early 20th century. He was also an urban planner who paved the way for and preserved many of the parks that are now in the Chicago Park District.
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Henning Jakob Henrik Lund
1875 - 1948 (73 years)
Henning Jakob Henrik Lund or Intel'eraq was a Greenlandic lyricist, painter, and pastor. He wrote the lyrics to "Nunarput utoqqarsuanngoravit," in the indigenous Greenlandic language, an Eskimo–Aleut language. The song was adopted as the national anthem of Greenland.
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Thomas Greenwood
1790 - 1871 (81 years)
Thomas Greenwood was an English barrister, academic and historian. Life The second son of Thomas Greenwood, a London merchant, he was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1815 and M.A. in 1831. He entered Gray's Inn on 14 March 1809, and was called to the bar on 24 June 1817.
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Philip Jessup
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Philip Caryl Jessup , also Philip C. Jessup, was a 20th-century American diplomat, scholar, and jurist notable for his accomplishments in the field of international law. Early life and education Philip Caryl Jessup was born on January 5, 1897, in New York, New York. He was the grandson of Henry Harris Jessup In 1919, he received his undergraduate A.B. degree from Hamilton College. In 1924, he received a law degree from Yale Law School. In 1927, he received a doctorate from Columbia University.
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Weston J. Morrow
#4126
Max Radin
1880 - 1950 (70 years)
Max Radin was an American legal scholar, philologist, and author. The noted anthropological scholar Paul Radin was his younger brother. Life and work Max Radin, son of the rabbi Adolph Moses Radin, was born in Kempen, German Empire, he emigrated with his family to the United States and grew up in New York. He received his early education from his father, who, among other things, taught him to speak Latin. Max studied at the City College of New York and the School of Law at Columbia University . After graduation, he worked as a lawyer and public school teacher in New York and continued his s...
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Paul Hunt
Paul Hunt, a New Zealand and British national, is a human rights expert who specialises in economic, social and cultural rights. In January 2019, he took up office as Chief Commissioner at the New Zealand Human Rights Commission.
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Josef Laurenz Kunz
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Josef Laurenz Kunz was an Austrian American jurist. He was a Professor of International Law at the University of Toledo from 1934 to 1960, after having emigrated from Austria in 1932. Kunz earned his doctorate degree in 1920 from the University of Vienna, where he was a student of Hans Kelsen.
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Karl Llewellyn
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
Karl Nickerson Llewellyn was an American jurisprudential scholar associated with the school of legal realism. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Llewellyn as one of the twenty most cited American legal scholars of the 20th century.
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Harold Saxton Burr
1889 - 1973 (84 years)
Harold Saxton Burr was E. K. Hunt Professor of Anatomy at Yale University School of Medicine and researcher into bio-electrics. Early life He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1889, to parents Hanford Burr and Clara Saxton. He studied in public schools and at the Technical High School in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1908 he was admitted to the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and received his Ph.B. in 1911. On December 27 of that year, in Chicago, he married Jean Chandler, with whom he had a son, Peter. In 1914 he was appointed Instructor in Anatomy at Yale. He studied for his Ph.D. under Ross Granville Harrison, which he received in 1915.
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John Franklin Enders
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
John Franklin Enders was an American biomedical scientist and Nobel Laureate. Enders has been called "The Father of Modern Vaccines." Life and education Enders was born in West Hartford, Connecticut on February 10, 1897. His father, John Ostrom Enders, was CEO of the Hartford National Bank and left him a fortune of $19 million upon his death. He attended the Noah Webster School in Hartford, and St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. After attending Yale University a short time, he joined the United States Army Air Corps in 1918 as a flight instructor and a lieutenant.
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Harry Kalven
1914 - 1974 (60 years)
Harry Kalven Jr. was an American jurist, regarded as one of the preeminent legal scholars of the 20th century. He was the Harry A. Bigelow Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, having graduated from the College and the Law School. Kalven coauthored, with Charles O. Gregory , a widely used textbook in the field of torts, Cases and Materials on Torts. Kalven was also a scholar in the field of constitutional law, particularly in the area of the first amendment. Kalven is the coauthor of "The Contemporary Function of the Class Suit," one of the most heavily cited articles i...
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George Walter McCoy
1876 - 1952 (76 years)
George Walter McCoy was an American physician. An international expert on leprosy, he served as director of the National Institute of Health for more than twenty years. Early life and education McCoy was born in 1876 in the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania. He was the son of Osborn George McCoy and his wife Lavanda Walters, and had one sibling, J. Ross McCoy, who died young in 1899. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1898 and completed his internship at City Hospital in Newark, New Jersey.
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Walton Hale Hamilton
1881 - 1958 (77 years)
Walton Hale Hamilton was an American law professor who taught at Yale Law School . In 1919, Hamilton coined the term "institutional economics". Life and work Born in Tennessee, Hamilton received a B.A. degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1907 and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1913. He married Lucile Elizabeth Rhodes in 1909; they had three children. The couple later divorced and he married Irene Till, on July 20, 1937, adopting her son by a previous marriage later having two children. He died in Washington, D.C., on October 27, 1958.
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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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