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,
#4501
Ibn Hazm
994 - 1064 (70 years)
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm was an Andalusian Muslim polymath, historian, muhaddith, jurist, philosopher, and theologian, born in the Caliphate of Córdoba, present-day Spain. Described as one of the strictest hadith interpreters, Ibn Hazm was a leading proponent and codifier of the Zahiri school of Islamic thought and produced a reported 400 works, of which only 40 still survive. In all, his written works amounted to some 80,000 pages. Described as one of the fathers of comparative religion, the Encyclopaedia of Islam refers to him as having been one of the leading thinkers...
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Christopher Columbus Langdell
1826 - 1906 (80 years)
Christopher Columbus Langdell was an American jurist and legal academic who was Dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895. Dean Langdell's legacy lies in the educational and administrative reforms he made to Harvard Law School, a task he was entrusted with by President Charles Eliot. Before Langdell's tenure the study of law was a rather technical pursuit in which students were simply told what the law is. Langdell applied the principles of pragmatism to the teaching of law as a result of which students were compelled to use their own reasoning powers to understand how the law might apply in a given case.
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Dred Scott
1799 - 1858 (59 years)
Dred Scott was an enslaved African American man who, along with his wife, Harriet, unsuccessfully sued for the freedom of themselves and their two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, popularly known as the "Dred Scott decision". The Scotts claimed that they should be granted freedom because Dred had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years, where slavery was illegal, and laws in those jurisdictions said that slaveholders gave up their rights to slaves if they stayed for an extended period.
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Friedrich Martens
1845 - 1909 (64 years)
Friedrich Fromhold Martens, or Friedrich Fromhold von Martens, was a diplomat and jurist in service of the Russian Empire who made important contributions to the science of international law. He represented Russia at the Hague Peace Conferences and helped to settle the first cases of international arbitration, notably the dispute between France and the United Kingdom over Newfoundland. As a scholar, he is probably best remembered today for having edited 15 volumes of Russian international treaties .
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Gaius
120 - 180 (60 years)
Gaius was a Roman jurist. Little is known about his personal life, including his name . It is also difficult to ascertain the span of his life, but it is assumed he lived from AD 110 to at least AD 179, as he wrote on legislation passed within that time.
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Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab
1704 - 1792 (88 years)
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab ibn Sulayman al-Tamimi was a Sunni Muslim scholar, theologian, preacher, activist, religious leader, jurist, and reformer from Najd in central Arabia, considered as the eponymous founder of the so-called Wahhabi movement. His prominent students included his sons Ḥusayn, Abdullāh, ʿAlī, and Ibrāhīm, his grandson ʿAbdur-Raḥman ibn Ḥasan, his son-in-law ʿAbdul-ʿAzīz ibn Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd, Ḥamād ibn Nāṣir ibn Muʿammar, and Ḥusayn āl-Ghannām.
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Karl Binding
1841 - 1920 (79 years)
Karl Ludwig Lorenz Binding was a German jurist known as a promoter of the theory of retributive justice. His influential book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens , written together with the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, was used by the Nazis to justify their T-4 Euthanasia Program.
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Maximilien Robespierre
1758 - 1794 (36 years)
Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a French lawyer and statesman who became one of the most widely known, influential, and controversial figures of the French Revolution. As a member of the Estates-General, the Constituent Assembly, and the Jacobin Club, he campaigned for the right to vote of all men, including the passive citizens who were initially excluded. He also advocated the abolition of the death penalty and the Atlantic slave trade. In 1791, Robespierre was elected as "public accuser" and became an outspoken advocate for male citizens without a political voice, for...
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Henry James Sumner Maine
1822 - 1888 (66 years)
Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, , was a British Whig comparative jurist and historian. He is famous for the thesis outlined in his book Ancient Law that law and society developed "from status to contract." According to the thesis, in the ancient world individuals were tightly bound by status dealing with a particular group while in the modern one, in which individuals are viewed as autonomous agents, they are free to make contracts and form associations with whomever they choose. Because of this thesis, Maine can be seen as one of the forefathers of modern legal anthropology, legal history and...
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René David
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
René David was a French Professor of Law. His work has been published in eight different languages. He was, in the second half of the 20th century, one of the key representatives in the field of comparative law.
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Solon
638 BC - 558 BC (80 years)
Solon was an Athenian statesman, constitutional lawmaker and poet. He is remembered particularly for his efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline in Archaic Athens. His reforms failed in the short term, yet Solon is credited with having laid the foundations for Athenian democracy. His constitutional reform also succeeded in overturning most laws established by Draco.
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Gustav Hugo
1764 - 1844 (80 years)
Gustav Hugo was a German jurist. Biography Hugo was born at Lörrach in Baden. From the gymnasium at Karlsruhe he passed in 1782 to the University of Göttingen, where he studied law for three years. Having received the appointment of tutor to the prince of Anhalt-Dessau, he took his doctor's degree at the University of Halle in 1788. Recalled in the same year to Göttingen as extraordinary professor of law, he became a full professor in 1792. In the preface to his Beiträge zur civilistischen Bucherkenntniss der letzten vierzig Jahre he gives a sketch of the condition of the civil law teaching ...
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Carl Hilty
1833 - 1909 (76 years)
Carl Andreas Hilty was a Swiss lawyer, professor of constitutional law, politician, philosopher, lay theologian and writer. Life Family background, education and early career Hilty was born in the small town of Werdenberg in the canton of St. Gallen in northeastern Switzerland. His father was the physician Johann Ulrich Hilty, who practised medicine in Chur, the capital of the eastern canton of the Grisons. His family had been based in Werdenberg for centuries and in 1835 he bought the crumbling Werdenberg Castle at an auction. Carl Hilty's mother Elisabeth hailed from Chur and was the daughter of a former regimental doctor of the French Army.
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James Fitzjames Stephen
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1st Baronet, KCSI was an English lawyer, judge, writer, and philosopher. One of the most famous critics of John Stuart Mill, Stephen achieved prominence as a philosopher, law reformer, and writer.
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Hersch Lauterpacht
1897 - 1960 (63 years)
Sir Hersch Lauterpacht was a British international lawyer, human rights activist, and judge at the International Court of Justice. Biography Hersch Lauterpacht was born on 16 August 1897 to a Jewish family in the small town of Żółkiew, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, near Lemberg , the capital of East Galicia. In 1911 his family moved to Lemberg. In 1915 he enrolled in the law school of the University of Lemberg; it is not clear whether he graduated. Lauterpacht himself later wrote that he had not been able to take the final examinations "because the university has been closed to Jews in Eastern Galicia".
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Alf Ross
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Alf Niels Christian Ross was a Danish jurist, legal philosopher and judge of the European Court of Human Rights . He is best known as one of the leading figures of Scandinavian legal realism. His debate in 1959 with the prominent British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart – which began in the Cambridge Law Journal – was important in framing the modern conflict between legal positivism and legal realism.
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George Wythe
1726 - 1806 (80 years)
George Wythe was an American academic, scholar and judge who was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. The first of the seven signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence from Virginia, Wythe served as one of Virginia's representatives to the Continental Congress and the Philadelphia Convention and served on a committee that established the convention's rules and procedures. He left the convention before signing the United States Constitution to tend to his dying wife. He was elected to the Virginia Ratifying Convention and helped ensure that his home state ratified the Constitution.
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Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet
1845 - 1937 (92 years)
Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet PC, FBA was an English jurist best known for his History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, written with F.W. Maitland, and his lifelong correspondence with US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was a Cambridge Apostle.
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John Chipman Gray
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
John Chipman Gray was an American scholar of property law and professor at Harvard Law School. He also founded the law firm Ropes & Gray, with law partner John Codman Ropes. He was half-brother to U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Horace Gray, and a grandson of merchant and politician William Gray.
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Edmund Randolph
1753 - 1813 (60 years)
Edmund Jennings Randolph was a Founding Father of the United States, attorney, and the 7th Governor of Virginia. As a delegate from Virginia, he attended the Constitutional Convention and helped to create the national constitution while serving on its Committee of Detail. He was appointed the first United States Attorney General by George Washington and subsequently served as the second Secretary of State during the Washington administration.
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Eduard Gans
1797 - 1839 (42 years)
Eduard Gans was a German jurist. Biography Gans was born in Berlin to prosperous Jewish parents. He studied law first at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin, then at Göttingen, and finally at Heidelberg, where he attended G. W. F. Hegel's lectures, and became thoroughly imbued with the principles of Hegel's philosophy. In 1820, after taking his doctor's degree, he returned to Berlin as a lecturer. In 1825 he converted to the Evangelical Church in Prussia, and the following year was appointed extraordinary, and in 1828 ordinary, professor in the Berlin University faculty of law. Before c...
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Jean Bodin
1530 - 1596 (66 years)
Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law in Toulouse. Bodin lived during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and wrote against the background of religious conflict in France. He seemed to be a nominal Catholic throughout his life but was critical of papal authority over governments and there was evidence he may have converted to Protestantism during his time in Geneva. Known for his theory of sovereignty, he favoured the strong central control of a national monarchy as an antidote to factional strife.
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Ferdinand Lassalle
1825 - 1864 (39 years)
Ferdinand Lassalle was a Prussian-German jurist, philosopher, socialist and politician who is best remembered as the initiator of the social-democratic movement in Germany. "Lassalle was the first man in Germany, the first in Europe, who succeeded in organising a party of socialist action", according to Élie Halévy. Or, as Rosa Luxemburg put it: "Lassalle managed to wrestle from history in two years of flaming agitation that needed decades to come about". As an agitator, he coined the terms night-watchman state and iron law of wages.
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William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
1705 - 1793 (88 years)
William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, PC was a British barrister, politician and judge noted for his reform of English law. Born to Scottish nobility, he was a member of the Scottish Clan Murray, he was educated in Perth, Scotland, before moving to London at the age of 13 to take up a place at Westminster School. He was accepted into Christ Church, Oxford, in May 1723, and graduated four years later. Returning to London from Oxford, he was called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn on 23 November 1730, and quickly gained a reputation as an excellent barrister.
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Radhabinod Pal
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Radhabinod Pal was an Indian jurist who was a member of the United Nations' International Law Commission from 1952 to 1966. He was one of three Asian judges appointed to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the "Tokyo Trials" of Japanese war crimes committed during the Second World War. Among all the judges of the tribunal, he was the only one who submitted a judgment which insisted all defendants were not guilty. The Yasukuni Shrine and the Kyoto Ryozen Gokoku Shrine have monuments specially dedicated to Pal.
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Ernst Forsthoff
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Ernst Forsthoff was a German scholar of constitutional law and a leading theorist of administrative law. Life Forsthoff, the son of pastor , was called to teach law at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main 1933, at the University of Hamburg in 1935, at the Albertina in Königsberg in 1936 and at the University of Vienna in 1942. There he was forbidden to exercise his teaching post by the Gestapo until 1943, when he was called to the University of Heidelberg.
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Wendell Phillips
1811 - 1884 (73 years)
Wendell Phillips was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney. According to George Lewis Ruffin, a Black attorney, Phillips was seen by many Blacks as "the one white American wholly color-blind and free from race prejudice". According to another Black attorney, Archibald Grimké, as an abolitionist leader he is ahead of William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner. From 1850 to 1865 he was the "preeminent figure" in American abolitionism.
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John J. McCloy
1895 - 1989 (94 years)
John Jay McCloy was an American lawyer, diplomat, banker, and presidential advisor. He served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II under Henry Stimson, helping deal with issues such as German sabotage, political tensions in the North Africa Campaign, and opposing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, he served as the president of the World Bank, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Warren Commission, and a prominent United States adviser to all presidents from Franklin D.
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Cesare Beccaria
1738 - 1794 (56 years)
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio was an Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher, economist and politician, who is widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment. He is well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments , which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology and the Classical School of criminology. Beccaria is considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice.
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A. V. Dicey
1835 - 1922 (87 years)
Albert Venn Dicey, was a British Whig jurist and constitutional theorist. He is most widely known as the author of Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution . The principles it expounds are considered part of the uncodified British constitution. He became Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford, one of the first Professors of Law at the LSE Law School, and a leading constitutional scholar of his day. Dicey popularised the phrase "rule of law", although its use goes back to the 17th century.
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Julius Paulus Prudentissimus
#4532
Jacob Grimm
1785 - 1863 (78 years)
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm , also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie, and the editor of Grimms' Fairy Tales. He was the older brother of Wilhelm Grimm; together, they were the literary duo known as the Brothers Grimm.
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Giambattista Vico
1668 - 1744 (76 years)
Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities, in addition to being the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics. He is recognised as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures in history.
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Axel Hägerström
1868 - 1939 (71 years)
Axel Anders Theodor Hägerström was a Swedish philosopher. Born in Vireda, Jönköping County, Sweden, he was the son of a Church of Sweden pastor. As student at Uppsala University, he gave up theology for a career in philosophy. Teaching there from 1893 until his retirement in 1933, he attacked the then dominant philosophical idealism of the followers of Christopher Jacob Boström . He is best known as a founder of the positivistic Uppsala school of philosophy—the Swedish counterpart of the Anglo-American Analytical Philosophy as well as of the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle—and as the...
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Maurice Hauriou
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Maurice Hauriou was a French jurist and sociologist whose writings shaped French administrative law in the late 19th and early 20th century. Hauriou taught public law at the University of Toulouse since 1888, and constitutional law since 1920. His work gave French administrative law a new dogmatic basis, including through his textbooks Précis de droit administratif et de droit public général , Précis élémentaire de droit administratif , Précis de droit constitutionnel and Principes de droit public .
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Marcel Planiol
1853 - 1931 (78 years)
Marcel Planiol was a French professor of law at the University of Rennes, then at the Sorbonne. He wrote on the law and on historical Brittany. He is known for his Elementary Treatise of Civil Law , which attempted to explain French civil law in terms of elementary principles, particularly the maxims of Roman law.
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Alberico Gentili
1552 - 1608 (56 years)
Alberico Gentili was an Italian-English jurist, a tutor of Queen Elizabeth I, and a standing advocate to the Spanish Embassy in London, who served as the Regius professor of civil law at the University of Oxford for 21 years. He is heralded as the founder of the science of international law alongside Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius, and thus known as the "Father of international law". Gentili has been the earliest writer on public international law. In 1587, he became the first non-English person to be a Regius Professor.
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James Barr Ames
1846 - 1910 (64 years)
James Barr Ames was an American law educator, who popularized the "case-study" method of teaching law. Biography Ames was born in Boston, Massachusetts on June 22, 1846; son of Samuel T. and Mary H. Ames and grandson of James Barr, M.D. He received his primary education in Boston, then graduated from Harvard College in 1868 , and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1872 . He began working as a tutor and instructor at Harvard in 1871, and continued until 1873, when he was admitted to the bar. Although a licensed lawyer, Ames did not open a private practice, spending his full-time at Harvard ...
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Ivor Jennings
1903 - 1965 (62 years)
Sir William Ivor Jennings was a British lawyer and academic. He served as the vice chancellor of the University of Cambridge and the University of Ceylon . Education Jennings was educated at Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, Bristol , at Bristol Grammar School, and at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
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Gratian
1070 - 1140 (70 years)
#4541
Bruno Leoni
1913 - 1967 (54 years)
Bruno Leoni was an Italian classical-liberal political philosopher and lawyer. Whilst the war kept Leoni away from teaching, in 1945 he became Full professor of Philosophy of Law. Leoni was also appointed Dean of the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pavia from 1948 to 1960.
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Edward Carson
1854 - 1935 (81 years)
Edward Henry Carson, Baron Carson, PC, PC , from 1900 to 1921 known as Sir Edward Carson, was an Irish unionist politician, barrister and judge, who served as the Attorney General and Solicitor General for England, Wales and Ireland as well as the First Lord of the Admiralty for the British Royal Navy. From 1905 Carson was both the Irish Unionist Alliance MP for the Dublin University constituency and leader of the Ulster Unionist Council in Belfast. In 1915, he entered the war cabinet of H. H. Asquith as Attorney-General. Carson was defeated in his ambition to maintain Ireland as a whole in union with Great Britain.
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Aleksandr Gradovsky
1841 - 1889 (48 years)
Aleksandr Gradovsky was a Russian jurist. A professor of law at St. Petersburg University since 1869, he was a leading theorist of Russian administrative and constitutional law. He was succeeded by Nikolay Korkunov.
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Ernst Freund
1864 - 1932 (68 years)
Ernst Freund was a noted American legal scholar. He received a Dr. Jur. from the University of Heidelberg and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University . He was professor of political science at the University of Chicago and then professor of law at Chicago , serving as the John P. Wilson Professor of Law . Freund was principally responsible for the development of administrative law in the United States during the early twentieth century. He was one of the organizers of the Immigrants' Protective League . The University of Chicago Law School has established the Ernst Freund Di...
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Pliny the Younger
61 - 113 (52 years)
Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo , better known as Pliny the Younger , was a lawyer, author, and magistrate of Ancient Rome. Pliny's uncle, Pliny the Elder, helped raise and educate him.
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Dionisio Anzilotti
1867 - 1950 (83 years)
Dionisio Anzilotti was an Italian jurist and judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice. After law studies in Pisa, Anzilotti taught international law in Florence, Palermo, Bologna and Rome from 1892 to 1937. One of the main proponents of Heinrich Triepel's theory of dualism, his textbook of international law, Corso di diritto internazionale. Vol. I: Introduzione e teorie generali was translated into several languages.
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Francis Scott Key
1779 - 1843 (64 years)
Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer, author, and amateur poet from Frederick, Maryland, best known as the author of the text of the U.S. national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner". Key observed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814 during the War of 1812. He was inspired upon seeing the American flag still flying over the fort at dawn and wrote the poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry"; it was published within a week with the suggested tune of the popular song "To Anacreon in Heaven". The song with Key's lyrics became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner" and slowly gained in popularit...
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Carrie Chapman Catt
1859 - 1947 (88 years)
Carrie Chapman Catt was an American women's suffrage leader who campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave U.S. women the right to vote in 1920. Catt served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900 to 1904 and 1915 to 1920. She founded the League of Women Voters in 1920 and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904, which was later named International Alliance of Women. She "led an army of voteless women in 1919 to pressure Congress to pass the constitutional amendment giving them the right to vote and convinced state legislatures to ratify it in 1920".
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William H. Crawford
1772 - 1834 (62 years)
William Harris Crawford was an American politician and judge during the early 19th century. He served as US Secretary of War and US Secretary of the Treasury before he ran for US president in the 1824 election.
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Francesco Carnelutti
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
Francesco Carnelutti was an Italian jurist and lawyer. Born in Udine, Carnelutti graduated in law at the University of Padua. Starting from 1910, he was professor of industrial law at the Bocconi University in Milan, professor of commercial law at the University of Catania, and professor of civil procedure in his alma mater, at the Bocconi University and at the Sapienza University of Rome.
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