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.
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List of the most influential people in Law,
#4301
Johann Freinsheim
1608 - 1660 (52 years)
Johann Freinsheim , also known under the Latinized form of the name, Johannes Frenshemius, was a German classical scholar and critic. Freinsheim was born at Ulm on November 16, 1608, and after studying at several universities: Marburg, Giessen and Strassburg, he visited France, where he remained for three years.
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Ahmad ibn Abi Jum'ah
Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn Abi Jum'ah al-Maghrawi al-Wahrani was an Algerian Maliki scholar of Islamic law, active in the Maghreb from the end of the fifteenth century until his death. He was identified as the author of the 1504 fatwa commonly named the Oran fatwa, instructing the Muslims in Spain about how to secretly practice Islam, and granting comprehensive dispensations for them to publicly conform to Christianity and performing acts normally forbidden in Islam when necessary to survive. Because of his authorship of the fatwa he is often referred to as "the Mufti of Oran", although he likel...
Go to Profile#4303
Kate Claghorn
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Kate Holladay Claghorn was an American sociologist, economist, statistician, legal scholar, and Progressive Era activist, who became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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Pierre Grégoire
1540 - 1597 (57 years)
Pierre Grégoire was a French jurist and philosopher Career and key ideas Grégoire was born to a poor Catholic family in Toulouse. He studied the law and made a career for himself as an influential and at times controversial Catholic jurist. He taught law at Cahors and Toulouse from 1566 until 1582 when his patron, Charles III of Lorraine, procured a professorship in civil and canon law for him at the university of Pont à Mousson. Here Grégoire found himself colleague to the Scottish jurist William Barclay, best known for his invention of the term ‘monarchomach’ and his political treatise De Regno et Regali Potestate .
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John D. Wickhem
1888 - 1949 (61 years)
John Dunne Wickhem was an American lawyer and jurist from Beloit, Wisconsin. He was a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 1930 until his death in 1949. Biography John D. Wickhem was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, in May 1888. He was raised and educated in Beloit, and went on to earn his bachelor's degree from Beloit College in 1910. After graduating, he taught school in Beloit for four years until entering the University of Wisconsin Law School. He graduated after just two years, speeding up his progression with summer courses. After law school, he went to work in the law office of Burr W.
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Filippo Decio
1454 - 1535 (81 years)
Filippo Decio or Decius was an Italian jurist whose services were courted by European universities and rulers. He was an influential representative of the pre-Humanist scholastic ius commune tradition, and one of the leading jurists of his time together with Felino Sandeo, Antonio Cocchi Donati and Bartolomeo Socini.
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Julius Herman Boeke
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Julius Herman Boeke was a Dutch economist and lawyer. He was a professor of Dutch Constitutional Law at Leiden University, where he lectured and published works on the subject of the economy of the Dutch East Indies.
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David Smith
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Sir David Stanley Smith was a New Zealand lawyer, judge and educationalist. Smith was born in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand in 1888. He worked for Charles Morison as an assistant from 1912. He Smith was appointed as a judge to the Supreme Court in 1928, a relatively early appointment based on his performance as counsel for Maori land claims. Smith received a knighthood in the 1948 New Year Honours. A few months later, he resigned as a judge and concentrated on public affairs.
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Ibn Abi Jumhur al-Ahsa'i
1435 - 1505 (70 years)
Mohammed bin Ali bin Ibrahim Al-Shaybani Al-Bakri Al-Ahsa’i was an influential Shia Muslim scholar who adhered to the Ja'fari school of Islamic jurisprudence. He was born in the village of Taymiyyah in Eastern Arabia during the reign of the first Jabrid Emir, and was raised in prosperity by his father Zain al-Din Ali and grandfather Ibrahim, both Shi’ite scholars. Ibn Abi Jumhur studied first with them before traveling on to Najaf in what is now Iraq to study with Sharaf al-Din Hassan bin Abdulkarim Fattal, who gave him permission to transmit hadith. In 1472, the young postulant went on Hajj and met Ali bin Hilal al-Jazaery in Jabal Amel, giving the latter the same permission.
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Carl Ludwig Wilhelm Grolman
1775 - 1829 (54 years)
Carl Ludwig Wilhelm Grolman, since 1812 von Grolmann, was Jurist and Grand Duchy of Hesse Minister-President.
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John Carr
1772 - 1832 (60 years)
Sir John Carr was an English barrister and writer. Life Carr, from Devonshire, was called to the bar at the Middle Temple, but for health reasons began to travel. Accounts of his journeys around Europe were popular for their light style.
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Petrus Wesseling
1692 - 1764 (72 years)
Petrus Wesseling was a German philologist and jurist working in the Dutch Republic. He became famous as a philologist. Early life Petrus Wesseling was born to Gerardus Wesseling and Anna Reiners or Creter on 7 January 1692 Old Style. When he was 10 he lost his father. He then went to his uncle Wessel Reiners, a merchant in Emden. Here Wesseling visited the Latin school. Later he went to the Gymnasium Arnoldinum in Steinfurt, where he was educated in classical languages and theology. His main teachers were August Houck , Werner Justin Pagenstecher and Arnold Visch . In 1712 Wesseling ended his studies in Steinfurt with the disputation theologica de petra in Matthaei evang.
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Lowell Sherman
1885 - 1934 (49 years)
Lowell Sherman was an American actor and film director. In an unusual practice for the time, he served as both actor and director on several films in the early 1930s. He later turned exclusively to directing. Having scored huge successes directing the films She Done Him Wrong and Morning Glory , he was at the height of his career when he died after a brief illness.
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Charles H. Davis
1906 - 1976 (70 years)
Charles Hubbard Davis was a Republican lawyer who has twice served on the Illinois Supreme Court, once as Chief Justice, and on the Illinois Appellate Court, also as Presiding Justice. Davis was born, grew up and attended school in Fairfield, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago and became a lawyer in Rockford in 1931. He married Ruth Peugh on October 19, 1935, and had seven children.
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John Macmillan Brown
1845 - 1935 (90 years)
John Macmillan Brown was a Scottish-New Zealand academic, administrator and promoter of education for women. Brown was born in Irvine, the sixth child of Ann Brown and her husband, James Brown, a sea captain. John was raised in a family that placed high value on education—for both sexes. He attended Irvine Academy, then University of Edinburgh and University of Glasgow. He declined a Balliol scholarship in mathematics instead taking a Snell exhibition for Classics and philosophy.
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Marian Jedlicki
1899 - 1954 (55 years)
Marian Zygmunt Jedlicki was a Polish lawyer, historian and a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and the University of Poznań. He is well known for his translation of the Thietmar Chronicle, an early 11th century document .
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Ernst Marcus
1856 - 1928 (72 years)
Ernst Moses Marcus was a German lawyer and philosopher. He developed a theory of aether based on Immanuel Kant's posthumous work Opus Postumum, however sharply disagreeing with Erich Adickes interpretation. He used this to mount a criticism of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. He was a major influence on Salomo Friedlaender.
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Albert Coates
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Albert Coates was the founder and long-time director of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina. Coates earned a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina in 1918 and an LLB from Harvard University in 1923. Upon graduation, Coates joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina School of Law and taught there until 1969. In 1932, Coates founded the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina. He served as its director until 1962.
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Joseph Benham
Joseph Benham was U.S. Attorney for the District of Ohio in 1823, son of Captain Robert Benham and born in Kentucky. In 1815, Joseph graduated from the Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, its first graduation class.
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Robert Ashley
1565 - 1641 (76 years)
Robert Ashley was an English lawyer and translator during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and a Member of Parliament for Dorchester. Biography Ashley was the son of Anthony Ashley of Damerham, Hampshire, and Dorothy Lyte, daughter of John Lyte, Esq., of Lytes Cary of Somerset. He was the younger brother of Anthony Ashley, 1st Baronet of Wimborne St Giles, and the elder brother of Sir Francis Ashley of Dorchester.
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Aron Densușianu
1837 - 1900 (63 years)
Aron Densușianu was an Imperial Austrian-born Romanian critic, literary historian, folklorist and poet. He was born in Densuș, Hunedoara County, in the Transylvania region. His parents were the Romanian Orthodox priest Vizantie Pop and his wife Sofia . He was the brother of historian Nicolae Densușianu. From 1846 to 1848, he attended the normal school in Hațeg, followed by the Blaj gymnasium and the Sibiu legal academy . He made his poetry debut in 1860 in Foaie pentru minte, inimă și literatură and submitted poems, critical studies and political articles to the main Transylvanian periodicals of the time: Amicul școalei, Concordia, Federațiunea, Albina, Transilvania and Familia.
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Thomas Heywood
1574 - 1641 (67 years)
Thomas Heywood was an English playwright, actor, and author. His main contributions were to late Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre. He is best known for his masterpiece A Woman Killed with Kindness, a domestic tragedy, which was first performed in 1603 at the Rose Theatre by the Worcester's Men company. He was a prolific writer, claiming to have had "an entire hand or at least a maine finger in two hundred and twenty plays", although only a fraction of his work has survived.
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Robert Hamilton
1763 - 1831 (68 years)
Robert Hamilton FRSE was a Scottish advocate and close friend of Sir Walter Scott. Enjoying boat trips and other excursions together, Scott termed him Our Lord High Admiral Hamilton in his diaries. He is noted as a gourmand and suffered repeatedly from gout.
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Thomas Francis Meagher
1823 - 1867 (44 years)
Thomas Francis Meagher was an Irish nationalist and leader of the Young Irelanders in the Rebellion of 1848. After being convicted of sedition, he was first sentenced to death, but received transportation for life to Van Diemen's Land in Australia.
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Johann Oldendorp
1488 - 1567 (79 years)
Johann Oldendorp was a German jurist and reformer. Oldendorp was born in Hamburg. He was the son of a merchant and the nephew of the historian Albert Krantz, from whom he probably received his early education. In 1504, he attended the University of Rostock and later graduated from the university of Bologna, Italy, in 1515. In 1516, he was appointed Professor at Greifswald, where he served from 1517 as the Rector. He received his doctorate in 1520, and became a professor at the University of Frankfurt / Oder. In 1526 he moved to Rostock where he became a civic official: in 1534 he transferred to Lübeck and held a similar position.
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Georges-Henri Bousquet
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Georges-Henri Bousquet was a 20th-century French jurist, economist and Islamologist. He was a professor of law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Algiers where he was a specialist in the sociology of North Africa . He is also known for his translation work of the great Muslim authors, Al-Ghazali, a theologian who died in 1111 and Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun . He was known as a polyglot, spoke several European languages and Eastern ones .
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Erdmann Copernicus
1600 - 1573 (-27 years)
Erdmann Copernicus was a German poet, composer, and jurist mainly active in the Margraviate or Electorate of Brandenburg, a precursor to Prussia. Similar to the unrelated astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus , his name is documented in several partially Latinized variants: Erdmann/Erdmannus/Ertmannus/Erdmanus Kopernikus/Copernicus.
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Jean Vendeville
1527 - 1592 (65 years)
Jean Vendeville was a law professor and a bishop of Tournai. Life Vendeville was possibly born in Lille, the son of Guillaume Vendeville and Marie Des Barbieux. He went to school in Menin, and from the age of fifteen in Paris, where he studied law, beginning a legal practice in Arras. In 1551 he married Anne Roelofs, of Leuven, and in 1553 he obtained a doctorate in laws from the University of Leuven. In 1562 he was appointed professor of law at the newly founded University of Douai. He was influential in rallying secular support for the first establishment of diocesan seminaries in the Low Countries, and for the establishment of a Jesuit college at Douai.
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John Morton-Finney
1889 - 1998 (109 years)
John Morton-Finney was an American civil rights activist, lawyer, and educator who earned eleven academic degrees, including five law degrees. He spent most of his career as an educator and lawyer after serving from 1911 to 1914 in the U.S. Army as a member of the 24th Infantry Regiment, better known as the Buffalo soldiers, and with the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. Morton-Finney taught languages at Fisk University in Tennessee and at Lincoln University in Missouri, before moving to Indianapolis, Indiana, where he taught in the Indianapolis Public Schools for forty-seven years.
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Slim Summerville
1892 - 1946 (54 years)
Slim Summerville was an American film actor and director best known for his work in comedies. Early life Summerville was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his mother died when he was only five. Moving from New Mexico to Canada and later to Oklahoma, he had a nomadic upbringing. In Canada, in Chatham, Ontario, he lived with his English grandparents and obtained his first job there, working as a messenger for the Canadian Pacific Telegraphs.
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Bernard L. Diamond
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Bernard Lee Diamond was a Professor of law and psychiatry at the University of California, Berkeley. He is primarily known for his contribution to what is known as forensic psychiatry. He was an expert witness for the defense in many well known trials, most notably the trial of Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of killing Robert F. Kennedy. The defense based much of their case on Diamond's testimony that Sirhan was suffering from diminished capacity at the time that he fired the deadly shots. In the 1980's, Jonathon Marks, who was representing Mark David Chapman for his alleged act of murdering John Lennon, brought Dr.
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Edward J. Cannon
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Edward J. Cannon was the first and longest-serving dean of the Gonzaga University School of Law. He served as dean from 1912 to 1934. Career A well respected lawyer, Cannon was lauded as "one of the brilliant members of the Spokane bar. At the time of his death in 1934, Cannon was also honored as a "model trial lawyer" by his peers.
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Otto Mejer
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Otto Karl Alexander Mejer was a German canon law specialist and church historian. He studied law at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin and Jena, receiving his doctorate at Göttingen in 1841. While a student in Berlin, he was deeply influenced by the teachings of Friedrich Carl von Savigny. Not long after graduation, he became a lecturer at Göttingen, and in 1845/46 took an extended study trip to Rome.
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Edward Tompkins
1815 - 1872 (57 years)
Edward Tompkins was an American lawyer. He is best known for endowing a chair at the University of California where he had been elected to the board of regents. Background Tompkins was born in 1815 in rural Paris Hill, New York. Tompkins enrolled in Union College in 1831 and joined Sigma Phi. Tompkins graduated, earned a law degree at Hamilton College, and practiced law in Binghamton, New York as a partner to Daniel S. Dickinson. Tompkins married a Quaker woman, Mary Cook, from Bridgeport, Connecticut. She died several years later. Tompkins moved to San Francisco, California in 1859 where he continued as a lawyer.
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Lucius Edwin Smith
1822 - 1900 (78 years)
Lucius Edwin Smith was a United States lawyer, editor, clergyman and educator. Biography Smith graduated from Williams College in 1843, studied law in Williamstown, and was admitted to the bar in 1845. He served during 1847/8 as associate editor of the Hartford Courant, and in 1849 as associate editor, with Henry Wilson, of the Boston Republican. From 1849 to 1854 he was assistant corresponding secretary of the American Baptist Missionary Union, Boston. The next three years he spent in Newton Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1857, and became in 1858 pastor of the Baptist church in ...
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Viktorin Kornel of Všehrdy
1460 - 1520 (60 years)
Viktorin Kornel ze Všehrd or simply Všehrd , was a Czech humanist and lawyer, working towards the end of the 15th century as Vice-scribe at the Land Court in the Prague Castle. He is famous for the most penetrating analysis of the Czech common law that he has put forward on some 460 pages under the title "On the Laws of the Czech Land Nine Books" . He has also translated some Latin texts.
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Bonifacius Amerbach
1495 - 1562 (67 years)
Bonifacius Amerbach was a jurist, scholar, an influential humanist and the rector of the University of Basel for several terms. Early life and education Born on the 11 October 1495, he was the youngest son of the printer Johannes Amerbach who immigrated to Basel from Amorbach in Bavaria and Barbara Ortenberg. He was baptized in the and had two godfathers and one godmother. He received his primary education in Basel from where he was sent away from the family in 1502 and 1507 into safety from the plague. The second time to the monastery Engental in Muttenz, where his teacher was Conrad of Leonberg.
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Ludwig Raiser
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Ludwig Raiser was a German legal scholar. In 1961, he was one of the signatories of the Memorandum of Tübingen on West German foreign policy. He was President of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany from 1970 to 1973.
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Michael Chekhov
1891 - 1955 (64 years)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chekhov , known as Michael Chekhov, was a Russian-American actor, director, author, and theatre practitioner. He was a nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a student of Konstantin Stanislavski. Stanislavski referred to him as his most brilliant student.
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Anita Loos
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Corinne Anita Loos was an American actress, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In 1912, she became the first female staff screenwriter in Hollywood, when D. W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation. She is best known for her 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and her 1951 Broadway adaptation of Colette's novella Gigi.
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Johannes Sichardus
1499 - 1552 (53 years)
Johannes Sichardus was a humanist, jurist and law professor at the University of Türbingen. He also edited several editions for printers in Basel. Early life and education He was born in Tauberbischofsheim into a humble household. In later years, his father would become an innkeeper. With the support of an influential relative from Aschaffenburg, he attended the Latin school in Erfurt. From 1514, Sichard studied at the University of Ingolstadt and graduated in 1518 with a M.A. After graduation, he became a teacher at the schola poetica in Munich. In 1521 he moved to Freiburg where he lectured...
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Julia Sears
1840 - 1929 (89 years)
Julia Ann Sears was a pioneering academic and suffragist, achieving a milestone early in her career as she became the first woman to head a public college in the United States, in 1872. The school was Mankato Normal School, now Minnesota State University, Mankato, which named a residence hall after Sears in 2008.
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Jean Doujat
1609 - 1688 (79 years)
Jean Doujat was a French lawyer, juris consultus, professor of canon law at the Collège royal, docteur-régent at the faculté de droit de Paris, preceptor of the Dauphin and historian. His works include histories of the reign of Louis XIV.
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Gustavo Herrera
1890 - 1953 (63 years)
Gustavo Herrera Grau , was a Venezuelan lawyer and diplomat. Career He served as Finance Minister in 1936, Plenipotentiary Minister of Venezuela in Netherlands and Germany, acting head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Education, and Minister of Development in various presidential administrations. He was the Minister of Finance in 1936.
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Judah P. Benjamin
1811 - 1884 (73 years)
Judah Philip Benjamin, QC was a United States senator from Louisiana, a Cabinet officer of the Confederate States and, after his escape to the United Kingdom at the end of the American Civil War, an English barrister. Benjamin was the first Jew to hold a Cabinet position in North America and the first to be elected to the United States Senate who had not renounced his faith.
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Peter Friedrich Arpe
1682 - 1740 (58 years)
Peter Friedrich Arpe was a German lawyer, historian and legal writer. He was also the founder of a huge collection of objects and manuscripts on the history of Schleswig-Holstein, though his collection also included banned theological works. He also wrote and collected under the Latinised form of his name, Petrus Fridericus Arpius.
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Pedro Barbosa
1530 - 1606 (76 years)
Pedro Barbosa was a Portuguese jurist and the leading representative of the ius commune and the usus modernus in Portugal. Teaching law at the University of Coimbra in 1557–64, he came to hold the highest judicial offices, including with the Inquisition, as judge of the Casa da Suplicação and the Desembargo do Paço, and as Chanceler-mor do Reino. Barbosa also wrote numerous tractss on family law, inheritance law and procedural law.
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William Mather Lewis
1878 - 1945 (67 years)
William Mather Lewis was an American teacher, university president, local politician, and a state and national government official. He was mayor of Lake Forest, Illinois from 1915 to 1917, President of George Washington University from 1923 to 1927 and the President of Lafayette College from 1927 to 1945.
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E. Spencer Miller
1817 - 1879 (62 years)
Elihu Spencer Miller was a Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Biography Miller was born in Princeton, New Jersey. He attended the College of New Jersey , graduating in 1836. He trained as a lawyer in Princeton and Baltimore, Maryland. He passed the bar, and moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1843, setting up a practice.
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William Hickey
1749 - 1830 (81 years)
William Hickey was an English lawyer, but is best known for his vast Memoirs, composed in 1808–10 and published between 1913 and 1925, which in their manuscript form cover 750 closely-written folio pages. Described by Peter Quennell as "One of the most remarkable books of its kind ever published in the English Language", Hickey's Memoirs give an extraordinarily vivid picture of life in late 18th-century London, Calcutta, Madras and Jamaica which stands comparison with the best of his near-contemporary James Boswell.
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