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
Herbert Kraus
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Herbert Kraus was a German professor of public international law. He was the first director of the Institute of International Law at the University of Göttingen. Due to his criticism of Nazism he was forced to retire between 1937 and 1945.
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Louis Marshall
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Louis Marshall was an American corporate, constitutional and civil rights lawyer as well as a mediator and Jewish community leader who worked to secure religious, political, and cultural freedom for all minority groups. Among the founders of the American Jewish Committee , he defended Jewish and minority rights. He was also a conservationist, and the force behind re-establishing the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, which evolved into today's State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry .
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José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia
1766 - 1840 (74 years)
José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco was a Paraguayan lawyer and politician, and the first dictator of Paraguay following its 1811 independence from the Spanish Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. His official title was "Supreme and Perpetual Dictator of Paraguay", but he was popularly known as El Supremo.
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Benjamin Butler
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Benjamin Franklin Butler was an American major general of the Union Army, politician, lawyer, and businessman from Massachusetts. Born in New Hampshire and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, Butler is best known as a political major general of the Union Army during the American Civil War and for his leadership role in the impeachment of U.S. President Andrew Johnson. He was a colorful and often controversial figure on the national stage and on the Massachusetts political scene, serving five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and running several campaigns for governor before his election...
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Johann Jakob Bachofen
1815 - 1887 (72 years)
Johann Jakob Bachofen was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor for Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1845. Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric matriarchy, or Das Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World. Bachofen assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum. He postulated an archaic "mother-right" within the context of a...
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Maurycy Allerhand
1868 - 1942 (74 years)
Maurycy Allerhand was a Polish lawyer and the Professor of Law at the Lviv University . His authored more than 1,000 works including publications in the field of procedural law as well as civil and commercial ethnography. He was murdered in Belzec during the Holocaust.
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Emilio Betti
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Emilio Betti was an Italian jurist, Roman Law scholar, philosopher and theologian. He is best known for his contributions to hermeneutics, part of a broad interest in interpretation. As a legal theorist, Betti is close to interpretivism.
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Victor D'Hondt
1841 - 1901 (60 years)
Victor Joseph Auguste D'Hondt was a Belgian lawyer and jurist of civil law at Ghent University. He devised a procedure, the D'Hondt method, which he first described in 1878, for allocating seats to candidates in party-list proportional representation elections. The method has been adopted by a number of countries, including Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Fiji, Finland, Israel, Japan, North Macedonia, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Slovenia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Iceland, Uruguay and Wales.
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Hajime Kaneko
1906 - 1973 (67 years)
Hajime Kaneko was a Japanese jurist noted for his contributions to the law of civil procedure. Kaneko was appointed professor at the University of Tokyo in 1931, and left the chair in 1950 to practice law. His writings contributed to the dogmatic structure of civil procedure, and his textbook System of Civil Procedure Law was very influential in teaching and legal practice.
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Vasco Núñez de Balboa
1475 - 1519 (44 years)
Vasco Núñez de Balboa was a Spanish explorer, governor, and conquistador. He is best known for having crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean in 1513, becoming the first European to lead an expedition to have seen or reached the Pacific from the New World.
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Antoni Peretiatkowicz
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Antoni Peretiatkowicz was a Polish legal scholar, considered one of the most prominent legal jurists of twentieth century Poland. Studies Peretiatkowicz began law studies in Warsaw in 1902 and continued in Berlin, Lviv , and Cracow . He received a doctorate degree from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow in 1909. From 1909 to 1914, Peretiatkowicz continued his post-doctoral studies in Paris, Geneva, and Heidelberg. Under the influence of Georg Jellinek, Peretiatkowicz came to a decision to concentrate on constitutional law and political doctrines as his main area of research.
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Rodulfo Brito Foucher
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Rodulfo Brito Foucher was a Mexican lawyer and academic who was rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1942 to 1944. He was the father of journalist and feminist activist Esperanza Brito de Martí.
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William Walker
1824 - 1860 (36 years)
William Walker was an American physician, lawyer, journalist, and mercenary. In the era of the expansion of the United States, driven by the doctrine of "manifest destiny", Walker organized unauthorized military expeditions into Mexico and Central America with the intention of establishing slave-holding colonies. Such an enterprise was known at the time as "filibustering".
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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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