John Roberts
1955 - Present (67 years)
John Glover Roberts Jr. is an American lawyer and jurist serving as the 17th chief justice of the United States since 2005. Roberts has authored the majority opinion in several landmark cases, including Shelby County v. Holder, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, King v. Burwell, Department of Commerce v. New York, and Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California. He has been described as having a conservative judicial philosophy but has shown a willingness to work with the Supreme Court's liberal bloc, and since the retirement of Anthony Kennedy in 2018 has come to be regarded as a swing vote on the Court.
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Cass Sunstein
1954 - Present (68 years)
Areas of Specialization: Administrative Law, Environmental Law and Law and Behavioral Economics Cass Sunstein is Harvard Law School’s Robert Walmsley University Professor. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from Harvard University and is a scholar of constitutional law and behavioral economics. Sunstein has served multiple faculty roles, with professorships at the University of Chicago and Columbia Law School. He was nominated by President Barack Obama, and subsequently confirmed by the Senate, as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for the United States Office of Management and Budget.
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Benito Juárez
1806 - 1872 (66 years)
Benito Pablo Juárez García was an ardent Mexican liberal, trained as a lawyer, and an active and effective politician who served as the 26th president of Mexico from 1858 until his death in office in 1872. He was the first president of Mexico who was of indigenous origin, of Zapotec ethnicity. He wrote only briefly about his indigenous heritage, in Apuntes para mis hijos, describing his parents as "Indians of the country's primitive race." His vision of Mexico was that individual indigenous Mexicans would become full citizens of Mexico, equal before the law. "Everything that Juárez and the Liberal circle stood for militated against [his] identification" as an indigenous person.
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Karl Llewellyn
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
Karl Nickerson Llewellyn was a prominent American jurisprudential scholar associated with the school of legal realism. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Llewellyn as one of the twenty most cited American legal scholars of the 20th century.
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William Jennings Bryan
1860 - 1925 (65 years)
William Jennings Bryan was an American orator and politician. Beginning in 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the Democratic Party, running three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States in the 1896, 1900, and the 1908 elections. He served in the House of Representatives from 1891 to 1895 and as the Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, he was often called "The Great Commoner".
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Tony Honoré
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Anthony Maurice Honoré, was a British lawyer and jurist, known for his work on ownership, causation and Roman law. Biography Honoré was born in London but was brought up in South Africa. He served in the South African Infantry during the Second World War and was severely wounded in the Battle of Alamein. After the war he continued his studies at New College, Oxford, and he lived and taught in Oxford for seventy years, including periods as a Fellow of The Queen's College and then of New College. Between 1971 and 1988 he was Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls Col...
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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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Daniel Webster
1782 - 1852 (70 years)
Daniel Webster was an American lawyer and statesman who represented New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress and served as the U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. As one of the most prominent American lawyers of the 19th century, he argued over 200 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court between 1814 and his death in 1852. During his life, he was a member of the Federalist Party, the National Republican Party, and the Whig Party.
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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 to traditional groups, 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 sociology...
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Francisco Suárez
1548 - 1617 (69 years)
Francisco Suárez, was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, one of the leading figures of the School of Salamanca movement, and generally regarded among the greatest scholastics after Thomas Aquinas. His work is considered a turning point in the history of second scholasticism, marking the transition from its Renaissance to its Baroque phases. According to Christopher Shields and Daniel Schwartz, "figures as distinct from one another in place, time, and philosophical orientation as Leibniz, Grotius, Pufendorf, Schopenhauer and Heidegger, all found reason to cite him as a sourc...
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Francisco Cavalcanti Pontes de Miranda
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Francisco Cavalcanti Pontes de Miranda was a prominent Brazilian jurist, judge, diplomat and professor of Law at the Federal University of Pernambuco. He occupied the 7th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1979, until his death.
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Reinhold Zippelius
1928 - Present (94 years)
Reinhold Zippelius is a German jurist and law scholar. Now retired, he was formerly the professor of the Philosophy of law and Public law at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Life and career Reinhold Walter Zippelius was born in Ansbach , the son of Hans Zippelius and Marie Zippelius. He embarked on his study of jurisprudence in 1947 at Würzburg and then at Erlangen. In 1949 he switched to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where between 1949 and 1961 he was supported by a scholarship-bursary. He received his doctorate in 1953. His habilitation , also from Munich, and supervi...
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Friedrich Martens
1845 - 1909 (64 years)
Friedrich Fromhold Martens, or Friedrich Fromhold von Martens, also known as Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens in Russian and Frédéric Frommhold Martens in French 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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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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Michael W. McConnell
1955 - Present (67 years)
Michael William McConnell is an American constitutional law scholar who served as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 2002 to 2009. Since 2009, McConnell has been a professor and Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is also a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and Senior Of Counsel to the Litigation Practice Group at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. In May 2020, Facebook appointed him to its content oversight board. In 2020, McConnell published "The President Who Would ...
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Theodor Herzl
1860 - 1904 (44 years)
Theodor Herzl or Hebrew name given at his brit milah Binyamin Ze'ev, was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state.
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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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Sonia Sotomayor
1954 - Present (68 years)
Sonia Maria Sotomayor is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009 and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman to hold the position. Sotomayor is the first woman of color, first Hispanic, and first Latina member of the Court.
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Guido Calabresi
1932 - Present (90 years)
Areas of Specialization: Law and Economics Guido Calabresi is a Senior United States Circuit Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale University. He is known, along with his colleagues Ronald Coase and Richard Posner , as a founder of the interdisciplinary study of law and economics. He earned a B.S. from Yale University, a B.A. from Magdalen College of Oxford University, an LL.B from Yale Law School and an M.A. from University of Oxford. Calabresi’s career has been remarkable. He was the youngest full professor at Yale Law School and he has pioneered methods of applying economic reasoning to the study of law.
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John C. Calhoun
1782 - 1850 (68 years)
John Caldwell Calhoun was an American statesman and political theorist from South Carolina who held many important positions including being the seventh vice president of the United States from 1825 to 1832, while adamantly defending slavery and protecting the interests of the white South. He began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent of a strong national government and protective tariffs. In the late 1820s, his views changed radically, and he became a leading proponent of states' rights, limited government, nullification, and opposition to high tariffs. He saw Northern acceptance of those policies as a condition of the South remaining in the Union.
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Jeremy Waldron
1953 - Present (69 years)
Areas of Specialization: Legal Philosophy Jeremy Waldron is a University Professor of the School of Law at New York University and an adjunct professor for Victoria University of Wellington. He earned a B.A. and an LL.B. from the University of Otago in New Zealand. He went on to earn a D.Phil. at Lincoln College, Oxford. Waldron’s extensive catalog of writings explore the rule of law, constitutionalism, homelessness, torture, and many other topics. His most recent book, One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality, was published in 2017. He has critically examined the notion of human dignity, and the impacts of a leveling of social classes by way of elevation of all to royalty.
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David Souter
1939 - Present (83 years)
David Hackett Souter is a retired associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from October 1990 to his retirement in June 2009. Appointed by US President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat that had been vacated by William J. Brennan Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and the Roberts Courts.
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George Mason
1725 - 1792 (67 years)
George Mason IV was an American planter, politician and delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, one of three delegates who refused to sign the Constitution. His writings, including substantial portions of the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, and his Objections to this Constitution of Government opposing ratification, have exercised a significant influence on American political thought and events. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Mason principally authored, served as a basis for the United States Bill of Rights, a document of which...
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William Tecumseh Sherman
1820 - 1891 (71 years)
William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War , achieving recognition for his command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the scorched earth policies that he implemented against the Confederate States. British military theorist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart declared that Sherman was "the first modern general".
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Thomas Buergenthal
1934 - Present (88 years)
Thomas Buergenthal is a renowned international lawyer, scholar, law school dean, and former judge of the International Court of Justice . He resigned his ICJ post as of 6 September 2010 and returned to his position at The George Washington University Law School where he is currently the Lobingier Professor Emeritus of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence.
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Alexis de Tocqueville
1805 - 1859 (54 years)
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville , colloquially known as Tocqueville , was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both, he analysed the improved living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.
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Hermann Roesler
1834 - 1894 (60 years)
Carl Friedrich Hermann Roesler was a German legal scholar, economist, and foreign advisor to the Meiji period Empire of Japan. Biography Early life Life in Japan In 1878, Roesler was invited by the government of Japan to serve as an advisor on international law to the Foreign Ministry. One compelling reason for his choice to move to Japan was due to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1878, Roesler faced dismissal from service in Mecklenburg due to his religion. A timely meeting with Japanese ambassador to Germany, Aoki Shūzō introduced Roesler to a new opportunity, and Roesler became on...
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Bryan A. Garner
1958 - Present (64 years)
Bryan Andrew Garner is an American lawyer, lexicographer, and teacher who has written more than two dozen books about English usage and style such as Garner's Modern English Usage for a general audience, and others for legal professionals. He also wrote two books with Justice Antonin Scalia: Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges and Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts .
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Günther Jakobs
1937 - Present (85 years)
Günther Jakobs , is a German jurist, specializing in criminal law, criminal procedural law and philosophy of law. Jakobs studied legal sciences in Cologne, Kiel and Bonn, and in 1967 he graduated from the University of Bonn with a thesis on criminal law and competition doctrine.
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Robert Schuman
1886 - 1963 (77 years)
Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Robert Schuman was a Luxembourg-born French statesman. Schuman was a Christian Democrat political thinker and activist. Twice Prime Minister of France, a reformist Minister of Finance and a Foreign Minister, he was instrumental in building postwar European and trans-Atlantic institutions and was one of the founders of the European Union, the Council of Europe and NATO. The 1964–1965 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. In 2021, Schuman was declared venerable by Pope Francis in recognition of his acting on Christian principles.
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Soli Sorabjee
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Soli Jehangir Sorabjee, AM was an Indian jurist who served as Attorney-General for India from 1989 to 1990, and again from 1998 to 2004. In 2002, he received the Padma Vibhushan for his defence of the freedom of expression and the protection of human rights.
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L. F. L. Oppenheim
1858 - 1919 (61 years)
Lassa Francis Lawrence Oppenheim was a German jurist. He is regarded by many as the father of the modern discipline of international law, especially the hard legal positivist school of thought. He inspired Joseph Raz and Prosper Weil.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
1841 - 1935 (94 years)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was an American jurist and legal scholar who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932. He is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices and most influential American common law judges in history, noted for his long service, concise, and pithy opinions—particularly for opinions on civil liberties and American constitutional democracy—and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures. Holmes retired from the court at the age of 90, an unbeaten record for oldest justice on the United States Supreme Court.
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Antoine Lavoisier
1743 - 1794 (51 years)
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier , also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution, was a French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and who had a large influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology. It is generally accepted that Lavoisier's great accomplishments in chemistry stem largely from his changing the science from a qualitative to a quantitative one. Lavoisier is most noted for his discovery of the role oxygen plays in combustion. He recognized and named oxygen and hydrogen , and opposed the phlogiston theory. Lavoisier ...
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Georg Jellinek
1851 - 1911 (60 years)
Georg Jellinek was an Austrian public lawyer and was considered to be "the exponent of public law in Austria“. Life From 1867, Jellinek studied law, history of art and philosophy at the University of Vienna. He also studied philosophy, history and law in Heidelberg and Leipzig up until 1872. He was the son of Adolf Jellinek, a famous preacher in Vienna's Jewish community. In 1872 he completed his Dr. phil. thesis in Leipzig and in 1874 also his Dr. jur. in Vienna.
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Ferdinand Lassalle
1825 - 1864 (39 years)
Ferdinand Lassalle was a Prussian-German jurist, philosopher, socialist and political activist 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", or, as Rosa Luxemburg put it: "Lassalle managed to wrestle from history in two years of flaming agitation what needed many decades to come about." As agitator he coined the terms night-watchman state and iron law of wages.
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Peter Hogg
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Peter Wardell Hogg was a New Zealand-born Canadian legal scholar and lawyer. He was best known as a leading authority on Canadian constitutional law, with the most academic citations in Supreme Court jurisprudence of any living scholar during his lifetime, according to Emmett Macfarlane of the University of Waterloo.
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Christian Wolff
1679 - 1754 (75 years)
Christian Wolff was a German philosopher. Wolff was the most eminent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant. His main achievement was a complete oeuvre on almost every scholarly subject of his time, displayed and unfolded according to his demonstrative-deductive, mathematical method, which perhaps represents the peak of Enlightenment rationality in Germany.
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Antonio Cassese
1937 - 2011 (74 years)
Antonio Cassese was an Italian jurist who specialized in public international law. He was the first President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the first President of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon which he presided over until his resignation on health grounds on 1 October 2011.
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Claus Roxin
1931 - Present (91 years)
Claus Roxin is a German jurist. He is one of the most influential dogmatists of German penal law and has gained national and international reputation in this field. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate by 27 universities around the world as well as the Bundesverdienstkreuz first class.
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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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Norberto Bobbio
1909 - 2004 (95 years)
Norberto Bobbio was an Italian philosopher of law and political sciences and a historian of political thought. He also wrote regularly for the Turin-based daily La Stampa. Bobbio was a social liberal in the tradition of Piero Gobetti, Carlo Rosselli, , and Aldo Capitini. He was also strongly influenced by Hans Kelsen and Vilfredo Pareto.
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John Marshall Harlan
1833 - 1911 (78 years)
John Marshall Harlan was an American lawyer and politician who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1877 until his death in 1911. He is often called "The Great Dissenter" due to his many dissents in cases that restricted civil liberties, including the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson. Many of Harlan's views expressed in his notable dissents would become the official view of the Supreme Court starting from the 1950s Warren Court and onward. His grandson John Marshall Harlan II was also a Supreme Court justice.
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Gustave Moynier
1826 - 1910 (84 years)
Gustave Moynier was a Swiss Jurist who was active in many charitable organizations in Geneva. He was a co-founder of the "International Committee for Relief to the Wounded", which became the International Committee of the Red Cross after 1876. In 1864 he took over the position of President of the Committee from Guillaume-Henri Dufour, and he was also a major rival of the founder Henry Dunant. During his record long term of 46 years as president he did much to support the development of the Committee in the first decades after its creation.
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Nicolaus Copernicus
1473 - 1543 (70 years)
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
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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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Brian Dickson
1916 - 1998 (82 years)
Robert George Brian Dickson was a Canadian lawyer, military officer and judge. He was appointed a puisne justice of the Supreme Court of Canada on March 26, 1973, and subsequently appointed the 15th Chief Justice of Canada on April 18, 1984. He retired on June 30, 1990.
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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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Theodor Mommsen
1817 - 1903 (86 years)
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician and archaeologist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. His work regarding Roman history is still of fundamental importance for contemporary research. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902 for being "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome", after having been nominated by 18 members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was also a prominent German politician, as a member of the Prussian and German parliaments.
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Franz Gürtner
1881 - 1941 (60 years)
Franz Gürtner was a German Minister of Justice in the governments of Franz von Papen, Kurt von Schleicher and Adolf Hitler. Gürtner was responsible for coordinating jurisprudence in the Third Reich and provided official sanction and legal grounds for a series of repressive actions under the Nazi regime from 1933 until his death in 1941.
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