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,
#4151
Hermann Heller
1891 - 1933 (42 years)
Hermann Heller was a German legal scholar and philosopher of Jewish descent. He was active in the non-Marxist wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic. He attempted to formulate the theoretical foundations of the social-democratic relations to the state, and nationalism. He was politically active in the relatively conservative Hofgeismarer Kreis of the SPD and is believed to have authored the group's statement of principles.
Go to Profile#4152
Louis St. Laurent
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Louis Stephen St. Laurent was a Canadian lawyer and politician who served as the 12th prime minister of Canada from 1948 to 1957. Born and raised in southeastern Quebec, St. Laurent was a leading lawyer and a supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada. In December 1941, he entered politics as minister of justice under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. In February 1942, he won a by-election in the riding of Quebec East. In September 1946, St. Laurent became secretary of state for external affairs and served in that post until two years later, when he became leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister, succeeding King who retired.
Go to Profile#4153
Samuel Sewall
1652 - 1730 (78 years)
Samuel Sewall was a judge, businessman, and printer in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, best known for his involvement in the Salem witch trials, for which he later apologized, and his essay The Selling of Joseph , which criticized slavery. He served for many years as the chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, the province's high court.
Go to Profile#4154
Robert McKimson
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Robert Porter McKimson Sr. was an American animator and illustrator, best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons from Warner Bros. Cartoons and later DePatie–Freleng Enterprises. He wrote and directed many animated cartoon shorts starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, Hippety Hopper, Speedy Gonzales, and the Tasmanian Devil, among other characters. He also developed Bugs Bunny's design in the 1943 short Tortoise Wins by a Hare.
Go to Profile#4155
Scipione Gentili
1563 - 1616 (53 years)
Scipione Gentili was an Italian law professor and a legal writer. One of his six brothers was Alberico Gentili, one of the fathers of international law. Born at San Ginesio, Scipione Gentili left Italy at the age of 16 when he had to emigrate together with his father and his brother Alberico because of their Protestant beliefs. Together with his brother and his father, he settled in England, and, in the early 1580s, published several books with the London printer John Wolfe, all dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. Of them, the most important was a partial Latin translation of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata.
Go to Profile#4156
Horace Harmon Lurton
1844 - 1914 (70 years)
Horace Harmon Lurton was a Confederate soldier and later, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Early life Lurton was born on February 26, 1844, in Newport, Kentucky. He attended the Old University of Chicago, then received a Bachelor of Laws in 1867 from Cumberland School of Law .
Go to Profile#4157
Nicolae Titulescu
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Nicolae Titulescu was a Romanian politician and diplomat, at various times ambassador, finance minister, and foreign minister, and for two terms president of the General Assembly of the League of Nations .
Go to Profile#4158
John Hamilton
1899 - 1934 (35 years)
John "Red" Hamilton was a Canadian criminal and bank robber active in the 1920s–1930s, most notably as an associate of John Dillinger. He is best known for his lingering death and secret burial after being mortally wounded during a robbery.
Go to Profile#4159
Stephen Hopkins
1707 - 1785 (78 years)
Stephen Hopkins was a Founding Father of the United States, a governor of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, a chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, and a signer of the Continental Association and Declaration of Independence. He was from a prominent Rhode Island family, the grandson of William Hopkins who was a prominent colonial politician. His great-grandfather Thomas Hopkins was an original settler of Providence Plantations, sailing from England in 1635 with his cousin Benedict Arnold who became the first governor of the Rhode Island colony under the Royal Ch...
Go to Profile#4160
Falk Zipperer
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Falk-Wolfgang Zipperer was a German jurist and librarian. Zipperer was one of Heinrich Himmler's closest friends. Life Falk Zipperer attended Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich. In April 1917, Zipperer left grammar school and began officer training. After his participation in the First World War, reaching the rank of lieutenant, Zipperer began studying jurisprudence at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, under, among others, Konrad Beyerle. In 1921, he became active in the Corps Vandalia Graz. He finished his studies in 1928.
Go to Profile#4161
Nathan Abbott
1854 - 1941 (87 years)
Nathan D. Abbott was an American lawyer from the U.S. State of Maine. He was the co-founder of Stanford Law School, where he also served as its first dean. Personal life and education Abbott was born in Norridgewock, Maine, the son of Abiel Abbott and Sarah Smith Abbot on 11 July 1854. He studied in Norridgewock public schools until the age of 16. That year, in 1870, he moved to Andover, Massachusetts to study at Phillips Academy. After three years there, in 1873 he was admitted and studied at Yale College, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1877. At Yale, he was a member of Scroll...
Go to Profile#4162
Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut
1772 - 1840 (68 years)
Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut , was a German jurist and musician. Early life He was born at Hamelin, in Hanover, the son of an officer in the Hanoverian Army, of French Huguenot descent. After school in Hameln and Hanover, Thibaut entered the University of Göttingen as a student of jurisprudence, went from there to Königsberg, where he studied under Immanuel Kant, and afterwards to the University of Kiel, where he was a fellow-student with Niebuhr. Here, after taking his degree of doctor of laws, he became a Privat-dozent. His younger brother was Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut, a mathematician.
Go to Profile#4163
Karl Salomo Zachariae von Lingenthal
1769 - 1843 (74 years)
Karl Salomo Zachariae von Lingenthal, , a German jurist, was born at Meissen in Saxony, the son of a lawyer, and was the father of Karl Eduard Zachariae. Von Lingenthal received his early education at the famous public school of St. Afra in Meissen and later studied philosophy, history, mathematics and jurisprudence at the University of Leipzig. In 1792 he went to Wittenberg University as tutor to one of the counts of Lippe, and continued his legal studies.
Go to Profile#4164
John Erskine of Carnock
1695 - 1768 (73 years)
John Erskine of Carnock was a Scottish jurist and professor of Scottish law at the University of Edinburgh. He wrote the Principles of the Law of Scotland and An Institute of the Law of Scotland, prominent books on Scots law.
Go to Profile#4165
Jacob J. Rabinowitz
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
Jacob J. Rabinowitz was a professor of law, notable for his English translation of one of the Mishneh Torah books. Rabinowitz was born in Russia and at a young age immigrated with his family to the United States. His father, Rabbi Moshe Zvi Rabinowitz, was a rabbinical leader in Brooklyn, New York.
Go to Profile#4166
Geoffrey Cheshire
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Geoffrey Chevalier Cheshire was a British barrister and legal scholar. He was the father of Leonard Cheshire, the British war hero and founder of the Cheshire Foundation Homes for the Sick. Biography Born in 1886 to Walter Christopher Cheshire, of Northwich, Cheshire, a solicitor and Major of the 3rd Volunteer Battalion, Cheshire Regiment, and Clara , he was educated at Denstone College and Merton College, Oxford, obtaining a first class honours degree in Jurisprudence in 1908.
Go to Profile#4167
Austin Abbott
1831 - 1896 (65 years)
Austin Abbott, LL.D. was a lawyer and academic. He is probably best remembered as being the government counsel in the trial of Charles J. Guiteau for the assassination of President James Garfield. Early life On December 18, 1831, Abbott was born in Boston, Massachusetts, son of Jacob Abbott and Harriet Vaughan Abbott.
Go to Profile#4168
Hendrik Jacob Hamaker
1844 - 1911 (67 years)
Hendrik Jacob Hamaker was a Dutch jurist and scholar. After studies at Leiden University, he practiced law there. Beginning in 1877, he taught civil law at the University of Utrecht, and after 1895 co-edited a leading journal of civil law, Weekblad voor Privaatrecht, Notarisambt en Registratie. He is noted for his work on judicial methodology, arguing for a substantial independence of judges from positive law.
Go to Profile#4169
Charles Rann Kennedy
1808 - 1867 (59 years)
Charles Rann Kennedy was an English lawyer and classicist, best remembered for his involvement in the Swinfen will case and the issues of contingency fee agreements and legal ethics that it involved.
Go to Profile#4170
William Henry Harrison Hart
1857 - 1934 (77 years)
William Henry Harrison Hart was an African American attorney and Professor of Criminal Law at Howard University from 1887 to 1922. He won an important legal case, Hart v. State, 100 MD 595 . Biography Hart was born in Eufaula, Alabama, on October 31, 1857. His father was Henry Clay Hart, a white slave trader born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1829. He was a descendant of Thomas Hart, an English jurist who embarked at Baddow, Essex county, England, in the Desire, in 1635, landing at Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1639. He attended the American Missionary Association School in Eufaula from 1867 to 1874.
Go to Profile#4171
Christian Friedrich von Glück
1755 - 1831 (76 years)
Christian Friedrich von Glück was a German jurist. Born at Halle in the Duchy of Magdeburg on 1 July 1755, he studied from 1770 to 1776 at the University of Halle and on the 16 April 1777 he received a Doctor of Law for his dissertation . After seven years as a Privatdozent in 1784 he decided to go to Erlangen and became a professor of law at the Friedrich-Alexander-University. In 1785 he married Wilhelmine Elisabeth Geiger. From the marriage he had two sons, Christian Karl von Glück and Christian Wilhelm von Glück , and a daughter. Christian Friedrich von Glück died on 20 January 1831 in Er...
Go to Profile#4172
Stepan Kechekjan
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
Stepan Fyodorovich Kechekjan was a Russian-Armenian lawyer, historian and a specialist in the field of history and theory of state and law and history of political and legal doctrines. Professor, Doctor of Law Sciences. Honoured Scientist of the RSFSR.
Go to Profile#4173
William Dampier
1651 - 1715 (64 years)
William Dampier was an English explorer, pirate, privateer, navigator, and naturalist who became the first Englishman to explore parts of what is today Australia, and the first person to circumnavigate the world three times. He has also been described as Australia's first natural historian, as well as one of the most important British explorers of the period between Sir Francis Drake and Captain James Cook ; he "bridged those two eras" with a mix of piratical derring-do of the former and scientific inquiry of the latter. His expeditions were among the first to identify and name a number of p...
Go to Profile#4174
Justus Lipsius
1547 - 1606 (59 years)
Justus Lipsius was a Flemish Catholic philologist, philosopher, and humanist. Lipsius wrote a series of works designed to revive ancient Stoicism in a form that would be compatible with Christianity. The most famous of these is De Constantia . His form of Stoicism influenced a number of contemporary thinkers, creating the intellectual movement of Neostoicism. He taught at the universities in Jena, Leiden, and Leuven.
Go to Profile#4175
Jacques-Joseph Haus
1796 - 1881 (85 years)
Jacques-Joseph Haus was a Belgian lawyer. He was born in Würzburg to Ernest-Augustus Haus and Marie-Barbe Stang. He died in Ghent, Belgium. Haus attended school through to university in Würzburg. He achieved a doctor's rank in philosophy on 3 January 1814, two days before turning eighteen. Three years later, on 26 April 1817, he was proclaimed summa cum laude doctor in civil law and in canonical law.
Go to Profile#4176
Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie
1826 - 1882 (56 years)
Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie was an Irish jurist and economist. He was professor of jurisprudence and political economy in Queen's College, Belfast, noted for challenging the Wages-Fund doctrine and for addressing contemporary agrarian policy questions. A critic of Ricardian orthodoxy, he said that it had sidelined consumer behaviour and demand. He developed the idea of consumer sovereignty, but insisted that the analysis of demand should be based on historical and comparative institutional work.
Go to Profile#4177
Hsu Dau-lin
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Hsu Dau-lin was a distinguished legal scholar who made substantial contributions to the study of Tang and Song Law and, especially for new republican states, of Constitutional Law. He devoted his prime years to the service of China as government official and as diplomat, and spent his later years teaching Chinese legal history in Taiwan, and Chinese literature and philosophy in America.
Go to Profile#4178
Price Daniel
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Marion Price Daniel Sr. , was an American jurist and politician who served as a Democratic U.S. Senator and the 38th governor of Texas. He was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to be a member of the National Security Council, Director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness, and Assistant to the President for Federal-State Relations. Daniel also served as Associate Justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#4179
Chaïm Perelman
1912 - 1984 (72 years)
Chaïm Perelman was a Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique , with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver .
Go to Profile#4180
Gerhard Noodt
1647 - 1725 (78 years)
Gerhard Noodt was a Dutch jurist, born in Nijmegen. Educated at Leiden, Utrecht, and Franeker, he became a professor of law at the Nijmegen and the Franeker. As a writer on jurisprudence he acquired a wide reputation. His Latin style was modelled after the best writers, and his numerous works soon rose to the rank of standard authorities. Two of his political treatises were translated into French by Jean Barbeyrac, and appeared at Amsterdam in 1707 and 1714, under the respective titles of Pouvoir des souverains and Liberté de conscience.
Go to Profile#4181
Macvey Napier
1776 - 1847 (71 years)
Macvey Napier was a Scottish solicitor, legal scholar, and an editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was Professor of Conveyancing at the University of Edinburgh. Life Macvey was born on 12 April 1776 in Kirkintilloch the son of John Macvey a merchant in the town. His mother's maiden name was Napier.
Go to Profile#4182
Harold Hanbury
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Harold Greville Hanbury was Vinerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford from 1949 to 1964. Biography He was the only child of Basil Hanbury and his wife, Patience, née Verney, a daughter of Henry Verney, eighteenth Baron Willoughby de Broke.
Go to Profile#4183
Henry Moore Bates
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Henry Moore Bates was an American lawyer. He was dean of the University of Michigan Law School for 29 years. Born in Chicago, Bates received a Ph.B. from the University of Michigan in 1890 and a LL.B. from Northwestern University in 1892. After practicing law at Chicago, 1892–1903, he became Tappan Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and was made dean of the Law School there in 1910. In 1917–18 he was professor of law at the Harvard Law School and in 1921 he was appointed Commissioner of Uniform State Laws. He was president of the Association of American Law Schools , a member o...
Go to Profile#4184
Cornell Franklin
1892 - 1959 (67 years)
Cornell Sidney Franklin was an American lawyer, judge and politician who served as the chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council from 1937 to 1940. Early life Franklin was born April 1, 1892, in Columbus, Mississippi, United States. He was the son of Cornell Samuel and Mary Wycoff Franklin. He was educated at the Franklin Academy from which he graduated in 1909 and the University of Mississippi where he obtained a BA in 1913 and an LLB in 1914.
Go to Profile#4185
William Marshall Bullitt
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
William Marshall Bullitt was an influential lawyer and author who served as Solicitor General of the United States . Biography Background Bullitt was born to Thomas Walker Bullitt and Annie P. Logan in Louisville, Kentucky on March 4, 1873. His ancestors arrived in Kentucky in the 1700s: the Bullitts, the Walkers, the Christians and the Logans . His father studied law in Philadelphia.
Go to Profile#4186
J. H. C. Morris
1910 - 1984 (74 years)
John Humphrey Carlile Morris was a British legal scholar, best known for his contributions to the conflict of laws. Early life John Morris was born in Wimbledon on 18 February 1910, to Humphrey William Morris and Jessie Muriel, daughter of Henry Vercoe, of Pendarves, Camborne, Cornwall. Humphrey Morris had become a successful London solicitor, following his father, Howard Carlile Morris, who was a partner in a firm he had co-founded. Howard Morris's mother, Sarah Anne Carlile, was of a Scottish family; cousins were the politician and businessman Sir Hildred Carlile, 1st Baronet, and his brot...
Go to Profile#4187
Irving Stowe
1915 - 1974 (59 years)
Irving Harold Stowe was a Yale lawyer, activist, and a founder of Greenpeace. He was named one of the "BAM 100" . Biography Irving Stowe was born Irving Strasmich in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in Economics before completing a law degree at Yale. In the 1930s he studied Mandarin, believing it to be the language of the future. He chaired the Legal Advisory Committee of the Rhode Island Council for Human Rights; marched against nuclear proliferation; and on his wedding night both bride and groom attended a benefit dinner for the NAACP.
Go to Profile#4188
Burkard Wilhelm Leist
1819 - 1906 (87 years)
Burkard Wilhelm Leist was a German jurist. Biography He studied at Göttingen, Heidelberg and Berlin. He was appointed professor of civil law at Basel in 1846, at Rostock in 1847, and from 1853 he filled that chair at the University of Jena. He was a pupil of Savigny. He combined the historical method with analysis. After studies on the fundamental material of law, especially Roman law, he did valuable research in the hypothetical field of Indo-Germanic law.
Go to Profile#4189
H. V. Evatt
1894 - 1965 (71 years)
Herbert Vere Evatt, was an Australian politician and judge. He served as a judge of the High Court of Australia from 1930 to 1940, Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs from 1941 to 1949, and leader of the Australian Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1951 to 1960. Evatt is considered one of Australia's most prominent public intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Go to Profile#4190
Ulrich Zasius
1461 - 1535 (74 years)
Ulrich Zasius was a German jurist. Biography Zasius was born at Konstanz in 1461. After studying at Tübingen he first became episcopal notary at Constance, then town clerk at Baden in Aargau in 1489, and at Freiburg in 1493. From 1496 to 1499 he directed the Latin school at Freiburg.
Go to Profile#4191
Achille Guenée
1809 - 1880 (71 years)
Achille Guenée was a French lawyer and entomologist. Biography Achille Guenée was born in Chartres and died in Châteaudun. He was educated in Chartres, where he showed a very early interest in butterflies and was encouraged and taught by François de Villiers . He went to study law in Paris, then entered the “Bareau”. After the death of his only son, he lived at Châteaudun in Chatelliers. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Châteaudun was burned by the Prussians but Guénée's collections remained intact.
Go to Profile#4192
Hugues Doneau
1527 - 1591 (64 years)
Hugues Doneau, commonly referred also by the Latin form Hugo Donellus , was a French law professor and one of the leading representatives of French legal humanism . Life Doneau, who was born into a well-respected family, studied law in Toulouse and Bourges. Bourges was then a center of legal humanism and François Douaren , one of the most famous members of this movement was among Doneau's teachers at Bourges. In 1551, Doneau received a doctorate from the University of Bourges and began teaching there. However, because of his Calvinist confession, Doneau had to flee to Geneva after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572.
Go to Profile#4193
Paul Poiret
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Paul Poiret was a French fashion designer, a master couturier during the first two decades of the 20th century. He was the founder of his namesake haute couture house. Early life and career Poiret was born on 20 April 1879 to a cloth merchant in the poor neighborhood of Les Halles, Paris. His older sister, Jeanne, would later become a jewelry designer. Poiret's parents, in an effort to rid him of his natural pride, apprenticed him to an umbrella maker. There, he collected scraps of silk left over from the cutting of umbrella patterns, and fashioned clothes for a doll that one of his sisters had given him.
Go to Profile#4194
James Schouler
1839 - 1920 (81 years)
James Schouler was an American lawyer and historian best known for his historical work History of the United States under the Constitution, 1789–1865. Biography Schouler was born in West Cambridge , Massachusetts. He was the son of William Schouler, who from 1847 to 1853 edited the Boston Atlas, one of the leading Whig journals of New England. The son graduated at Harvard in 1859, studied law in Boston and was admitted to the bar there in 1862. In 1869 he removed to Washington, where for three years he published the United States Jurist.
Go to Profile#4195
Paweł Włodkowic
1370 - 1435 (65 years)
Paweł Włodkowic was a Polish scholar, jurist, statesman and rector of the Kraków Academy. He advocated a form of religious tolerance and defended Poland and native non-Christian tribes against the Teutonic Knights and the crusading movement in general.
Go to Profile#4196
Harry Burns Hutchins
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Harry Burns Hutchins was the fourth president of the University of Michigan . Biography On April 8, 1847, Harry B. Hutchins was born in Lisbon, New Hampshire. Hutchins got his education at New Hampshire Conference Seminary, now known as Tilton School, as well as the Vermont Conference Seminary. Hutchins, at the age of nineteen, entered Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Hutchins, unfortunately, was not able to complete his first year however due to falling ill. Subsequently, Hutchins graduated from the University of Michigan in 1871. While at the University of Michigan, he was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.
Go to Profile#4197
Frederik David Holleman
1887 - 1958 (71 years)
Frederik 'Frits' David Holleman was a Dutch and South African academic, ethnologist, and jurist, best known for his research into the indigenous legal systems of the Dutch East Indies and South Africa.
Go to Profile#4198
Morris Hillquit
1869 - 1933 (64 years)
Morris Hillquit was a founder and leader of the Socialist Party of America and prominent labor lawyer in New York City's Lower East Side. Together with Eugene V. Debs and Congressman Victor L. Berger, Hillquit was one of the leading public faces of American socialism during the first two decades of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4199
Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee
1747 - 1813 (66 years)
Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee FRSE was a Scottish advocate, judge, writer and historian who was a Professor of Universal History, and Greek and Roman Antiquities at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#4200
Theophilus Parsons
1797 - 1882 (85 years)
Theophilus Parsons was Dane Professor of Law at Harvard from 1848 to 1870. Parsons is remembered chiefly as the author of a series of useful legal treatises and some books in support of Swedenborgian doctrines. He wrote a biography of his father, an American jurist who was also named Theophilus Parsons . It was published in Boston in 1859. He also edited and published the Civil War letters of his daughter, Emily Elizabeth Parsons, a nurse and administrator of Benton Barracks military hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.
Go to Profile