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.
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List of the most influential people in Law,
#4401
A. K. Fazlul Huq
1873 - 1962 (89 years)
Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq , popularly known as Sher-e-Bangla , was a Bengali lawyer and politician who presented the Lahore Resolution which had the objective of creating an independent Pakistan. He also served as the first and longest Prime Minister of Bengal during the British Raj.
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Nassau William Senior
1790 - 1864 (74 years)
Nassau William Senior , was an English lawyer known as an economist. He was also a government adviser over several decades on economic and social policy on which he wrote extensively. Early life He was born at Compton, Berkshire, the eldest son of Rev. J. R. Senior, vicar of Durnford, Wiltshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford; at university he was a private pupil of Richard Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin with whom he remained connected by ties of lifelong friendship. He took the degree of B.A. in 1811 and became a Vinerian Scholar in 1813.
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Paul M. Bator
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Paul Michael Bator was an American legal academic, Supreme Court advocate and expert on United States federal courts. In addition to teaching for almost 30 years at Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, Bator served as Deputy Solicitor General of the United States during the Reagan Administration.
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Vittorio Emanuele Orlando
1860 - 1952 (92 years)
Vittorio Emanuele Orlando was an Italian statesman, who served as the Prime Minister of Italy from October 1917 to June 1919. Orlando is best known for representing Italy in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference with his foreign minister Sidney Sonnino. He was also known as "Premier of Victory" for defeating the Central Powers along with the Entente in World War I. He was also the provisional President of the Chamber of Deputies between 1943 and 1945, and a member of the Constituent Assembly that changed the Italian form of government into a republic. Aside from his prominent political role, Orland...
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Niels Nikolaus Falck
1784 - 1850 (66 years)
Niels Nikolaus Falck was a Danish jurist and historian. Biography He was born at Emmerlef in the Duchy of Schleswig. He was educated at the University of Kiel and became a theological candidate in 1808, graduating dr. phil. in 1809. From 1813 he was appointed professor juris in Kiel. In 1814, he became professor of law at the University of Kiel, and in 1838 he was appointed president of the Schleswig-Holstein Assembly of the States.
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Bernhard Windscheid
1817 - 1892 (75 years)
Bernhard Windscheid was a German jurist and a member of the pandectistic school of law thought. He became famous with his essay on the concept of a legal action, which sparkled a debate with that is said to have initiated the studies of the processal law as we know it today. Windscheid's thesis established the modern German law concept of Anspruch , distinguishing it from the Roman law concept of actio.
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Martin Wolff
1872 - 1953 (81 years)
Martin Wolff was a professor of law at the University of Berlin in Germany. In 1934, he was expelled from his post by the Nazis and emigrated to Britain, where he became a fellow at Oxford University. He specialized in private international law and property law, writing numerous works, including standard works in German and English.
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Lew Wallace
1827 - 1905 (78 years)
Lewis Wallace was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, artist, and author from Indiana. Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ , a bestselling novel that has been called "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century."
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Rudolf Sieverts
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Rudolf Sieverts was a German Law professor and Criminologist. Life Rudolf Sieverts was born in Meißen, a short distance down river from Dresden. His father, Adolf Ferdinand Sieverts, was a Chemistry professor.
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Alexandre Millerand
1859 - 1943 (84 years)
Alexandre Millerand was a French politician. He was Prime Minister of France from 20 January to 23 September 1920 and President of France from 23 September 1920 to 11 June 1924. His participation in Waldeck-Rousseau's cabinet at the start of the 20th century, alongside the Marquis de Galliffet, who had directed the repression of the 1871 Paris Commune, sparked a debate in the French Section of the Workers' International and in the Second International about the participation of socialists in bourgeois governments.
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Robert R. McCormick
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Robert Rutherford "Colonel" McCormick was an American lawyer, businessman and anti-war activist. A member of the McCormick family of Chicago, McCormick became a lawyer, Republican Chicago alderman, distinguished U.S. Army officer in World War I, and eventually owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. A leading Republican and isolationist; McCormick opposed the increase in federal power brought about by the New Deal and later opposed American entry into World War II. His legacy includes what is now the McCormick Foundation philanthropic organization.
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Paltiel Daykan
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Paltiel Daykan was an Israeli jurist. Early life Daykan was born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1885. He emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1921. Awards In 1957, Daykan was awarded the Israel Prize, for jurisprudence.
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Max Rheinstein
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Max Rheinstein was a German-born American jurist and political scientist. He was for many years a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Biography Max Rheinstein was born on July 5, 1899, in Bad Kreuznach, the only son of wine merchant Ferdinand Rheinstein and Rosalie Bernheim . He fought in the German Army in World War I, and subsequently studied law at the University of Munich. In the spring of 1919 Rheinstein participated in the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Becoming an assistant of Ernst Rabel, Rheinstein received his doctorate in law in 1924. He subsequently fol...
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Gaston Doumergue
1863 - 1937 (74 years)
Pierre Paul Henri Gaston Doumergue was a French politician of the Third Republic. He served as President of France from 1924 to 1931, succeeding Alexandre Millerand, who had resigned. Tasked with important ministerial portfolios, he was first appointed President of the Council of Ministers in 1913, but was forced to leave power a few months after his appointment. He was elected as President of the Senate in 1923.
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Laurence Olivier
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, was an English actor and director who, along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, was one of a trio of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles. Late in his career he had considerable success in television roles.
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Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
1486 - 1535 (49 years)
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was a German Renaissance polymath, physician, legal scholar, soldier, knight, theologian, and occult writer. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy published in 1533 drew heavily upon Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and neo-Platonism. His book was widely influential among esotericists of the early modern period, and was condemned as heretical by the inquisitor of Cologne.
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Johann Gottlieb Heineccius
1681 - 1741 (60 years)
Johann Gottlieb Heineccius was a German jurist from Eisenberg, Thuringia. Life He studied theology at Leipzig, and law at Halle; and at the latter university he was appointed in 1713 professor of philosophy, and in 1718 professor of jurisprudence. He subsequently filled legal chairs at Franeker in the Netherlands and at Frankfurt, but finally returned to Halle in 1733 as professor of philosophy and jurisprudence.
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Alejandro Álvarez
1868 - 1960 (92 years)
Manuel Alejandro Álvarez Jofré was a Chilean professor of international law and a judge at the International Court of Justice. He had been a founding member of the American Institute of International Law and of the Institute of Higher International Studies, from the Faculty of Law of Paris. He served as a judge in the International Court of Justice in 1946–1955.
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François Hotman
1524 - 1590 (66 years)
François Hotman was a French Protestant lawyer and writer, associated with the legal humanists and with the monarchomaques, who struggled against absolute monarchy. His first name is often written 'Francis' in English. His surname is Latinized by himself as Hotomanus, by others as Hotomannus and Hottomannus. He has been called "one of the first modern revolutionaries".
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Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane
1856 - 1928 (72 years)
Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, was a British lawyer and philosopher and an influential Liberal and later Labour politician. He was Secretary of State for War between 1905 and 1912 during which time the "Haldane Reforms" of the British Army were implemented. As an intellectual he was fascinated with German thought. That led to his role in seeking detente with Germany in 1912 in the Haldane Mission. The mission was a failure and tensions with Berlin forced London to work more closely with Paris.
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Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke
1690 - 1764 (74 years)
Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, was an English lawyer and politician who served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. He was a close confidant of the Duke of Newcastle, Prime Minister between 1754 and 1756 and 1757 until 1762.
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Oscar Micheaux
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux Early life and education Micheaux was born on a farm in Metropolis, Illinois, on January 2, 1884. He was the fifth child born to Calvin S. and Belle Michaux, who had a total of 13 children. In his later years, Micheaux added an "e" to his last name. His father was born a slave in Kentucky. Because of his surname, his father's family appears to have been enslaved by French-descended settlers. French Huguenot refugees had settled in Virginia in 1700; their descendants took slaves west when they migrated into Kentucky after the American Revolutionary War.
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Ernst Ferdinand Klein
1743 - 1810 (67 years)
Ernst Ferdinand Klein was a German jurist and prominent representative of the Berlin Enlightenment. Career Klein studied law at Halle under Daniel Nettelbladt, a follower of Christian Wolff, before practising law in Breslau. In 1781 he moved to Berlin, where he served in the Prussian justice department as an adviser to Frederick's High Chancellor Johann H. C. von Carmer and worked with Carl Gottlieb Svarez to co-author the reforming Prussian Civil Code, the Allgemeines Landrecht. He was active in the Mittwochsgesellschaft : his Freiheit und Eigenthum was presented as a set of dialogues between members of the society.
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Georg Friedrich Puchta
1798 - 1846 (48 years)
Georg Friedrich Puchta was an important German Legal scholar. Biography Born on 31 August 1798 at Kadolzburg in Bavaria, Puchta came of an old Bohemian Protestant family which had immigrated into Germany to avoid religious persecution. His father, Wolfgang Heinrich Puchta , a legal writer and district judge, imbued his son with legal conceptions and principles. From 1811 to 1816 Puchta attended the Egidiengymnasium at Nuremberg, during the headmastership of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, an eminent German philosopher.
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Victor Ehrenberg
1851 - 1929 (78 years)
Victor Gabriel Ehrenberg was a German jurist. Biography Ehrenberg was born in Wolfenbüttel, Duchy of Brunswick. He was the son of a Jewish couple, Philipp Samuel Ehrenberg and Julie Fischel, Principal of the Samson School in Wolfenbüttel. After gymnasium in Wolfenbüttel he studied legal science in Göttingen, Leipzig, Heidelberg and Freiburg. His brothers were Otto Ehrenberg and Richard Ehrenberg.
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Mihail Kogălniceanu
1817 - 1891 (74 years)
Mihail Kogălniceanu was a Romanian liberal statesman, lawyer, historian and publicist; he became Prime Minister of Romania on October 11, 1863, after the 1859 union of the Danubian Principalities under Domnitor Alexandru Ioan Cuza, and later served as Foreign Minister under Carol I. He was several times Interior Minister under Cuza and Carol. A polymath, Kogălniceanu was one of the most influential Romanian intellectuals of his generation. Siding with the moderate liberal current for most of his lifetime, he began his political career as a collaborator of Prince Mihail Sturdza, while serving ...
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Isaac Isaacs
1855 - 1948 (93 years)
Sir Isaac Alfred Isaacs, was an Australian lawyer, politician, and judge who served as the ninth Governor-General of Australia, in office from 1931 to 1936. He had previously served on the High Court of Australia from 1906 to 1931, including as Chief Justice from 1930.
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Thomas Hughes
1822 - 1896 (74 years)
Thomas Hughes was an English lawyer, judge, politician and author. He is most famous for his novel Tom Brown's School Days , a semi-autobiographical work set at Rugby School, which Hughes had attended. It had a lesser-known sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford .
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Arthur Goldberg
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Arthur Joseph Goldberg was an American statesman and jurist who served as the 9th U.S. Secretary of Labor, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the 6th United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
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Morgan Lewis
1754 - 1844 (90 years)
Morgan Lewis was an American lawyer, politician, and military commander. The second son of Francis Lewis, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Lewis fought in the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. He served in the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate and was New York State Attorney General and the third governor of New York .
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Heinrich Ahrens
1808 - 1874 (66 years)
Julius Heinrich Ahrens was a German philosopher, jurist, and professor in Brussels, Graz, and Leipzig. Life Born in Salzgitter, Ahrens studied in Wolfenbüttel and the University of Göttingen. Ahrens, whose main interest was the philosophy of law and the state, was a disciple of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, with whom he defended his habilitation De confoederatione germanica in 1830.
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David Davis
1815 - 1886 (71 years)
David Davis was an American politician and jurist who was a U.S. senator from Illinois and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He also served as Abraham Lincoln's campaign manager at the 1860 Republican National Convention, engineering Lincoln's successful nomination for president by that party.
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Eduard Huschke
1801 - 1886 (85 years)
Georg Philipp Eduard Huschke was a German jurist and authority on church government. He was born at Hannoversch Münden, a town in Lower Saxony, Germany. In 1817 Huschke went to Göttingen to study law. He was encouraged by Friedrich Carl von Savigny to go to Berlin, but returned to Göttingen and established himself as privatdozent, lecturing on the orations of Cicero, on Gaius and the history of law. Later he was appointed to a professorship in Rostock. In 1827 he accepted the position of professor of Roman law in Breslau.
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Otto Lenel
1849 - 1935 (86 years)
Otto Lenel was a German Jewish jurist and legal historian. His most important achievements are in the field of Roman law. Life and career Otto Lenel was born in Mannheim, Germany on 13 December 1849. He was the son of Moritz Lenel and Caroline Scheuer. He fought in the war against France in 1870/71.
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Stanley Forman Reed
1884 - 1980 (96 years)
Stanley Forman Reed was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1938 to 1957. He also served as U.S. Solicitor General from 1935 to 1938. Born in Mason County, Kentucky, Reed established a legal practice in Maysville, Kentucky, and won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives. He attended law school but did not graduate, making him the latest-serving Supreme Court Justice who did not graduate from law school. After serving in the United States Army during World War I, Reed emerged as a prominent corporate attorney and took positions with the Federal Farm Board and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
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Walter Nelles
1883 - 1937 (54 years)
Walter Nelles was an American lawyer and law professor. Nelles is best remembered as the co-founder and first chief legal counsel of the National Civil Liberties Bureau and its successor, the American Civil Liberties Union. In this connection, Nelles achieved public notice for his legal work on behalf of pacifists charged with violating the Espionage Act during World War I and in other politically charged civil rights and constitutional law cases in later years.
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Niceto Alcalá-Zamora
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Niceto Alcalá-Zamora y Torres was a Spanish lawyer and politician who served, briefly, as the first prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic, and then—from 1931 to 1936—as its president. Early life Alcalá-Zamora was born on 6 July 1877 in Priego de Cordoba, son of Manuel Alcalá-Zamora y Caracuel and Francisca Torres y del Castillo. His mother died when Niceto was three years old.
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Frede Castberg
1893 - 1977 (84 years)
Frede Castberg was a Norwegian jurist. The son of Johan Castberg, he served as professor and rector at the University of Oslo as well as president of The Hague Academy of International Law. Personal life Frede Castberg was born in Vardal as the son of jurist and politician Johan Castberg and his wife Karen Cathrine Anker . He was the paternal great-grandson of priest and politician Peter Hersleb Harboe Castberg, grandson of customs surveyor and politician Johan Christian Tandberg Castberg, nephew of violinist Torgrim Castberg and first cousin of illustrator Johan Christian Castberg. On the m...
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John Millar
1735 - 1801 (66 years)
John Millar of Glasgow was a Scottish philosopher, historian and Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow from 1761 to 1800. Biography Born a son of the manse of the Kirk o' Shotts, Shotts, Lanarkshire, John Millar was educated by an uncle and then on his father being transferred to the parish of Hamilton, at the Old Grammar School of Hamilton Continuing his studies at the University of Glasgow, he became one of the most important followers of Adam Smith, the founder of economic science. For a short time in the 1750s he was tutor in the household of Henry Home, Lord Kames. In 1760 he was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates.
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Arthur Baumgarten
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Arthur Edwin Paul Baumgarten was a German-Swiss jurist and legal philosopher. After voluntary exile in Switzerland, Baumgarten became a prominent legal scholar in East Germany. Biography Baumgarten was born on 31 March 1884 in Königsberg, East Prussia, a son of the anatomist and bacteriologist Paul Baumgarten. He visited the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Tübingen, where he graduated in 1902, and went on to study jurisprudence in Tübingen, Geneva and Leipzig.
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Eduardo Frei Montalva
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Eduardo Nicanor Frei Montalva was a Chilean political leader. In his long political career, he was Minister of Public Works, president of his Christian Democratic Party, senator, President of the Senate, and the 27th president of Chile from 1964 to 1970. His eldest son, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, also became president of Chile .
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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