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,
#4551
Ashbel Green Gulliver
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
Ashbel Green Gulliver was the dean of Yale Law School from 1940 to 1946. His nickname was "Pail"—from ashpail. Early life Gulliver went to Groton School for high school. He received a B.A. from Yale University in 1919, where he was secretary of the Elizabethan Club and a member of the Wolf's Head secret society.
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Pasquale Joseph Federico
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Pasquale Joseph Federico was a lifelong mathematician and longtime high-ranking official of the United States Patent Office. Biography He was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania. About 1910 the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he gained a bachelor's degree in physics at Case Institute of Technology in 1923. He then received his LL.B or law degree from Washington College of Law in 1932.
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Walter Marshall William Splawn
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Walter Marshall William Splawn was an American lawyer and economist. Splawn was an Arlington, Texas, native, born to William Butler and Mary Marshall Splawn on June 16, 1883. He graduated from Baylor University in 1906 with a bachelor's of arts degree. Splawn taught at his alma mater from 1910 to 1912, then began the practice of law in Fort Worth, Texas. He earned a master's of arts degree at Yale University in 1914, and returned to teach at Baylor in 1916. In 1919, Splawn joined the University of Texas at Austin faculty. While teaching economics in Austin, Splawn completed a doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1921.
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Rudolf Stammler
1856 - 1938 (82 years)
Karl Eduard Julius Theodor Rudolf Stammler was an influential German philosopher of law. He distinguished a purely formal concept of law from the ideal, the realization of justice. He thought that, rather than reacting and adjusting the law to economic pressures, the law should be deliberately steered towards the current ideal.
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Gerhart Husserl
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Gerhart Adolf Husserl was a German legal scholar and philosopher. He was the eldest son of philosopher Edmund Husserl . Born in Halle, Saxony, in 1893. He was on active duty during the Great war, and suffered a serious wound in 1917 and again in 1918, losing the sight of his left eye. Gerhart Husserl nonetheless managed to finish his University studies and habilitated in 1924. In two years, on 18 November 1926 he became a Professor of Law at the University of Kiel. He was dismissed due to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in 1933, and eventually emigrated to the United States.
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Robert von Hippel
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Robert Wilhelm Ferdinand von Hippel was a German jurist and University lecturer born in Königsberg. Family Robert was the son of Arthur von Hippel and elder brother of Eugen von Hippel and Richard von Hippel . He married Emma Bremer in Strasbourg during 1894 and was the father of four children, including German-American physicist Arthur R. von Hippel. After the death of his first wife, he married Johanna von Koenen , the daughter of Adolf von Koenen, in Göttingen during 1927.
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Enoch Crowder
1859 - 1932 (73 years)
Major General Enoch Herbert Crowder, USA was an American Army lawyer who served as the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army from 1911 to 1923. Crowder is most noted for implementing and administering the United States Selective Service Act of 1917, under which thousands of American men were drafted into military service during World War I.
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Max Grünhut
1893 - 1964 (71 years)
Max Grünhut was a German-British legal scholar and criminologist. Of Jewish descent, he emigrated to the United Kingdom to escape Nazism in 1939. Prior to that, he was held a professorship at the University of Bonn.
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Eleanor Bontecou
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Eleanor Bontecou was an American lawyer, civil rights advocate, law professor and government official. Bontecou served as an attorney and investigator for both the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. War Department. She also worked as a professor at two universities. During her career, Bontecou achieved national fame for her work in the civil liberties and women's rights movements.
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Alexander Haim Pekelis
1902 - 1946 (44 years)
Alexander Haim Pekelis was a jurist, scholar and activist. He lived and was educated throughout Europe in his early life and was a jurist in pre-fascist Italy before moving to France in 1938 and to the United States in 1941. He became the first foreign-born Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. Despite his short time in the United States before his untimely death in 1946 at the age of 44, he left his mark on modern United States jurisprudence, his work advocating and foretelling the role social sciences would come to play in deciding legal issues.
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Jules Basdevant
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Jules Basdevant was a French law professor. He was born in Anost, Saône-et-Loire, a village in the Parc naturel régional du Morvan about halfway between Paris and Lyon in eastern France. After obtaining his Ph.D. in law, he began teaching at the law faculty in Paris, in February 1903, as an agrégé. He was later transferred to the law faculty of Rennes where he lectured from 1903 to 1907. He then went to Grenoble, where he was a professor until 1918, when he went back to Paris. Basdevant was promoted several times; in 1922 as professor of international law and historical treaties, in 1924 as p...
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Gerhard Anschütz
1867 - 1948 (81 years)
Gerhard Anschütz was a noted German teacher of constitutional law and the leading commentator of the Weimar Constitution. His principal work is the two-volume legal encyclopedia Handbuch des deutschen Staatsrechts; his constitutional commentary saw 14 editions during the Weimar Republic. Anschütz, a proponent of legal positivism, taught constitutional law in Tübingen , Heidelberg , Berlin and again Heidelberg . A Democrat by conviction even during World War I, he resigned his teaching position in 1933 after the Nazis seized power. After World War II, he served as a consultant to the US mil...
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Adam Vetulani
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Adam Joachim Vetulani was a Polish historian of medieval and canon law, professor of the Jagiellonian University and a General Secretary of the Polish Academy of Learning . Biography He was the son of Polish high school professor, Roman Vetulani, and Elżbieta Kunachowicz, brother of Kazimierz, Tadeusz, Zygmunt, Maria, and Elżbieta. He attended high schools in Sanok and Cieszyn, in 1917 he passed examination of maturity in Vienna.
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Aemilius Ludwig Richter
1808 - 1864 (56 years)
Aemilius Ludwig Richter was a German jurist. Biography He was born at Stolpen, Saxony, and educated at Leipzig. His Corpus Juris Canonici led to his being appointed professor of law in Leipzig, and he held subsequently similar positions at the universities of Marburg and Berlin . He also served as councilor-in-chief of the consistory and privy councilor of the government.
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