List of Famous Law Professors
Updated June 15, 2019 20.2K views150 items
List of famous law professors, with photos, bios, and other information when available. Who are the top law professors in the world? This includes the most prominent law professors, living and dead, both in America and abroad. This list of notable law professors is ordered by their level of prominence, and can be sorted for various bits of information, such as where these historic law professors were born and what their nationality is. The people on this list are from different countries, but what they all have in common is that they're all renowned law professors.
Examples of people on this list include Cass Sunstein and John Yoo.
From reputable, prominent, and well known law professors to the lesser known law professors of today, these are some of the best professionals in the law professor field. If you want to answer the questions, "Who are the most famous law professors ever?" and "What are the names of famous law professors?" then you're in the right place. {#nodes}Ranked by
- Barack Hussein Obama born August 4, 1961is an American attorney and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American to be elected to the presidency. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating, he became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He represented the 13th district for three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 until 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate. He received national attention in 2004 with his March primary win, his well-received July Democratic National Convention keynote address, and his landslide November election to the Senate. In 2008, he was nominated for president a year after his campaign began, after a close primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. He was elected over Republican John McCain and was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, he was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Regarded as a centrist New Democrat, Obama signed many landmark bills into law during his first two years in office. The main reforms that were passed include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly referred to as the "Affordable Care Act" or "Obamacare"), the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 served as economic stimulus amidst the Great Recession. After a lengthy debate over the national debt limit, he signed the Budget Control and the American Taxpayer Relief Acts. In foreign policy, he increased U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, reduced nuclear weapons with the United States–Russia New START treaty, and ended military involvement in the Iraq War. He ordered military involvement in Libya in opposition to Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed by NATO-assisted forces. He also ordered the military operations that resulted in the deaths of Osama bin Laden and suspected Yemeni Al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki. After winning re-election by defeating Republican opponent Mitt Romney, Obama was sworn in for a second term in 2013. During this term, he promoted inclusiveness for LGBT Americans. His administration filed briefs that urged the Supreme Court to strike down same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional (United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges); same-sex marriage was fully legalized in 2015 after the Court ruled that a same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional in Obergefell. He advocated for gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, indicating support for a ban on assault weapons, and issued wide-ranging executive actions concerning climate change and immigration. In foreign policy, he ordered military intervention in Iraq in response to gains made by ISIL after the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, continued the process of ending U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan in 2016, promoted discussions that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement on global climate change, initiated sanctions against Russia following the invasion in Ukraine and again after Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, brokered a nuclear deal with Iran, and normalized U.S. relations with Cuba. Obama nominated three justices to the Supreme Court: Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were confirmed as justices, while Merrick Garland faced unprecedented partisan obstruction and was ultimately not confirmed. During his term in office, America's soft power and reputation abroad significantly improved.Obama's presidency has generally been regarded favorably, and evaluations of his presidency among historians, political scientists, and the general public place him among the upper tier of American presidents. Obama left office and retired in January 2017 and currently resides in Washington, D.C. A December 2018 Gallup poll found Obama to be the most admired man in America for an unprecedented 11th consecutive year, although Dwight D. Eisenhower was selected most admired in twelve non-consecutive years.
- Elizabeth Ann Warren (née Herring; born June 22, 1949) is an American politician and former academic serving as the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts since 2013. She was formerly a law school professor specializing in bankruptcy law. A member of the Democratic Party and a progressive, Warren has focused on consumer protection, economic opportunity, and the social safety net while in the Senate. Warren is a graduate of the University of Houston and Rutgers Law School and has taught law at several universities, including the University of Houston, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. She was one of the most cited professors in the field of commercial law before beginning her political career. She is the author of three and coauthor of six books, both academic and for a general audience. Warren's initial foray into public policy began in 1995 when she worked to oppose what eventually became a 2005 act restricting bankruptcy access for individuals. Her national profile rose during the late 2000s following her forceful public stances in favor of more stringent banking regulations following the 2007–08 financial crisis. She served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and was instrumental in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, of which she served as the first Special Advisor under President Obama. In November 2012, Warren won the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, defeating incumbent Republican Scott Brown and becoming the first female Senator from Massachusetts. She was assigned to the Senate Special Committee on Aging; the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Warren won reelection by a wide margin in 2018, defeating Republican nominee Geoff Diehl. On February 9, 2019, at a rally in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Warren announced her candidacy in the 2020 United States presidential election.
- Cass Robert Sunstein FBA (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics, who was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012. Earlier, as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 27 years, he wrote influential works on among other topics, regulatory and constitutional law. Since leaving the White House, Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School.
- Hugh Hewitt (born February 22, 1956) is an American radio talk show host with the Salem Radio Network and an attorney, academic, and author. Generally a conservative, and a devout Catholic, he writes about law, society, politics, and media bias in the United States. Hewitt is President and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation, a law professor at Chapman University School of Law, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a regular political commentator on NBC News and MSNBC.
- Elena Kagan (; born April 28, 1960) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama in May 2010, and confirmed by the Senate in August of the same year. She is the fourth woman to serve as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Kagan was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from Princeton University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Law School, she clerked for a federal Court of Appeals judge and for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She began her career as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, leaving to serve as Associate White House Counsel, and later as policy adviser under President Bill Clinton. After a nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which expired without action, she became a professor at Harvard Law School and was later named its first female dean. In 2009, Kagan became the first female Solicitor General of the United States. President Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy arising from the impending retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens. The United States Senate confirmed her nomination by a vote of 63 to 37. She is considered part of the Court's liberal wing, but tends to be one of the more moderate justices of that group. She wrote the majority opinion in Cooper v. Harris, a landmark case restricting the permissible uses of race in drawing congressional districts.
- John Choon Yoo (born July 10, 1967) is a Korean-American attorney, law professor, former government official, and author. Yoo is currently the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he served as the Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Department of Justice, during the George W. Bush administration. He is best known for his opinions concerning the Geneva Conventions that attempted to legitimize the War on Terror by the United States. He also authored the so-called Torture Memos, which concerned the use of what the Central Intelligence Agency called enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding. In 2009, two days after taking office, President Barack Obama in Executive Order 13491 repudiated and revoked all legal guidance on interrogation authored by Yoo and his successors in the Office of Legal Counsel between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.
