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,
#4201
Alexander Bickel
1924 - 1974 (50 years)
Alexander Mordecai Bickel was an American legal scholar and expert on the United States Constitution. One of the most influential constitutional commentators of the twentieth century, his writings emphasize judicial restraint.
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Grant Gilmore
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Grant Gilmore was an American law professor who taught at Yale Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, the College of Law at the Ohio State University, and Vermont Law School. He was a scholar of commercial law and one of the principal drafters of the Uniform Commercial Code.
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Roger Sherman
1721 - 1793 (72 years)
Roger Sherman was an early American statesman, lawyer, and a Founding Father of the United States. He is the only person to sign all four great state papers of the United States: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He also signed the 1774 Petition to the King.
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Felix Dahn
1834 - 1912 (78 years)
Felix Dahn was a German law professor, German nationalist author, poet and historian. Biography Ludwig Julius Sophus Felix Dahn was born in Hamburg as the oldest son of Friedrich and Constanze Dahn who were notable actors at the city's theatre. The family had both German and French roots. Dahn began his studies in law and philosophy in Munich , and graduated as Doctor of Laws in Berlin. After his habilitation treatise, Dahn became a lecturer of German Law in Munich in 1857. In 1863 he became senior lecturer/associate professor in Würzburg, received a professorship in Königsberg .
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Bartolus de Saxoferrato
1313 - 1357 (44 years)
Bartolus de Saxoferrato was an Italian law professor and one of the most prominent continental jurists of Medieval Roman Law. He belonged to the school known as the commentators or postglossators. The admiration of later generations of civil lawyers is shown by the adage nemo bonus íurista nisi bartolista — no one is a good jurist unless he is a Bartolist .
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James M. Landis
1899 - 1964 (65 years)
James McCauley Landis was an American government official and legal adviser. He served as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1935 to 1937. Biography Landis was born in Tokyo, Japan, where his parents were teachers at a missionary school. After completing his studies at Mercersburg Academy in 1916, he graduated from Princeton University and in 1924 received a LL.B. from Harvard Law School, where he was a student of Felix Frankfurter. In 1925, Landis was a law clerk to Justice Louis Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court. He then became a professor at Harvard Law School, until ...
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Léon Duguit
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
Léon Duguit was a leading French scholar of public law . After a stint at Caen from 1882 to 1886, he was appointed to a chair of constitutional law at the University of Bordeaux in 1892, where one of his colleagues was Émile Durkheim.
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Midhat Pasha
1822 - 1883 (61 years)
Ahmed Şefik Midhat Pasha was an Ottoman politician, reformist and statesman. He was the author of the Constitution of the Ottoman Empire. Midhat was born in Istanbul and educated from a private . In July 1872, he was appointed grand vizier by Abdulaziz , though was removed in August. During the First Constitutional Era, in 1876, he co-founded the Ottoman Parliament. Midhat was noted as a kingmaker and leading Ottoman democrat. He was part of a governing elite which recognized the crisis the Empire was in and considered reform to be a dire need. Midhat was reportedly killed in al-Ta'if.
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Irnerius
1050 - 1140 (90 years)
Irnerius , sometimes referred to as lucerna juris , was an Italian jurist, and founder of the School of Glossators and thus of the tradition of medieval Roman Law. He taught the newly recovered Roman lawcode of Justinian I, the Corpus Juris Civilis, among the liberal arts at the University of Bologna, his native city. The recovery and revival of Roman law, taught first at Bologna in the 1070s, was a momentous event in European cultural history. Irnerius' interlinear glosses on the Corpus Juris Civilis stand at the beginnings of a European law that was written, systematic, comprehensive and rat...
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Coco Chanel
1883 - 1971 (88 years)
Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel was a French fashion designer and businesswoman. The founder and namesake of the Chanel brand, she was credited in the post–World War I era with popularizing a sporty, casual chic as the feminine standard of style. This replaced the "corseted silhouette" that had earlier been dominant with a style that was simpler, far less time-consuming to put on and remove, more comfortable, and less expensive, all without sacrificing elegance. She is the only fashion designer listed on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. A prolific f...
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Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos
1744 - 1811 (67 years)
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was a Spanish neoclassical statesman, author, philosopher and a major figure of the Age of Enlightenment in Spain. Life and influence of his works Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was born at Gijón in Asturias, Spain. Selecting law as his profession, he studied at Oviedo, Ávila, and the University of Alcalá, before becoming a criminal judge at Seville in 1767.
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James Bradley Thayer
1831 - 1902 (71 years)
James Bradley Thayer was an American legal theorist and educator. Life Born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard College in 1852, where he established the overcoat fund for needy undergraduates. In 1856 he graduated from Harvard Law School, was admitted to the bar of Suffolk County and began to practice law in Boston. From 1873 to 1883 he was Royall professor of law at Harvard. In 1883 he was transferred to the professorship which after 1893 was known as the Weld professorship and which he held until his death on February 14, 1902. He took a special interest in the historica...
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Rufus King
1755 - 1827 (72 years)
Rufus King was an American Founding Father, lawyer, politician, and diplomat. He was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress and the Philadelphia Convention and was one of the signers of the United States Constitution in 1787. After formation of the new Congress, he represented New York in the United States Senate. He emerged as a leading member of the Federalist Party and was the party's last presidential nominee during the 1816 presidential election.
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Adhémar Esmein
1848 - 1913 (65 years)
Jean Paul Hippolyte Emmanuel Adhémar Esmein was a French jurist. He authored numerous textbooks on the history of French public law and French constitutional law. He also wrote numerous monographs on other subjects, particularly including canon law, the teaching of which in France he renewed through his works. His most famous one is perhaps his "History of Continental Criminal Procedure" which was first published in 1913 and has since been widely received in academic literature.
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John Selden
1584 - 1654 (70 years)
John Selden was an English jurist, a scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution and scholar of Jewish law. He was known as a polymath; John Milton hailed Selden in 1644 as "the chief of learned men reputed in this land."
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Gustave Boissonade
1825 - 1910 (85 years)
Gustave Émile Boissonade de Fontarabie was a French legal scholar, responsible for drafting much of Japan's civil code during the Meiji Era, and honored as one of the founders of modern Japan's legal system.
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Samuel Williston
1861 - 1963 (102 years)
Samuel Williston was an American lawyer and law professor who authored an influential treatise on contracts. Early life, education and family Williston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to a family prosperous from the mercantile trade but whose fortunes declined during his youth, which he recalled, "served as a spur to endeavor."
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Ivan Fojnickij
1847 - 1913 (66 years)
Ivan Jakovlevich Fojnickij was a leading theorist of criminal law in the late Russian Empire. In 1877, Fojnickij was appointed senior public prosecutor in Saint Petersburg. He was also the chairman of the Russian section of the International Union of Criminologists and taught law at the Saint Petersburg State University from 1881 onwards.
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Soia Mentschikoff
1915 - 1984 (69 years)
Soia Mentschikoff was a Russian American lawyer, law professor, legal scholar and law school dean, best known for her work in the development and drafting of the Uniform Commercial Code. She served as dean of University of Miami School of Law. She was also the first woman to teach at Harvard Law School.
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Arthur Nussbaum
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
Arthur Nussbaum was a German-born American jurist. He studied legal science in Berlin from 1894 till 1897. He taught at Humboldt University of Berlin . In 1934, he moved to the United States, and in 1940, he became a US citizen.
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John Bassett Moore
1860 - 1947 (87 years)
John Bassett Moore was an American lawyer and authority on international law. Moore was a State Department official, a professor at Columbia University, and a judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice from 1922 to 1928, the first American judge to sit on that judicial body.
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Robert H. Jackson
1892 - 1954 (62 years)
Robert Houghwout Jackson was an American lawyer, jurist, and politician who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1941 until his death in 1954. He had previously served as United States Solicitor General and United States Attorney General, and is the only person to have held all three of those offices. Jackson was also notable for his work as Chief United States Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals following World War II.
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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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Andrey Vyshinsky
1883 - 1954 (71 years)
Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat. He is best known as a state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and in the Nuremberg trials. He was the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953, after having served as Deputy Foreign Minister under Vyacheslav Molotov since 1940. He also headed the Institute of State and Law in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
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