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The Most Famous

LAWYERS from United States

This page contains a list of the greatest American Lawyers. The pantheon dataset contains 68 Lawyers, 31 of which were born in United States. This makes United States the birth place of the most number of Lawyers.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary American Lawyers of all time. This list of famous American Lawyers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of American Lawyers.

1. J. Edgar Hoover (1895 - 1972)

With an HPI of 70.52, J. Edgar Hoover is the most famous American Lawyer. His biography has been translated into 53 different languages on wikipedia.

John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law-enforcement administrator who served as the final Director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) and the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). President Calvin Coolidge first appointed Hoover as director of the BOI, the predecessor to the FBI, in 1924. After 11 years in the post, Hoover became instrumental in founding the FBI in June 1935, where he remained as director for an additional 37 years until his death in May 1972 – serving a total of 48 years leading both the BOI and the FBI and under eight Presidents. Hoover expanded the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency and instituted a number of modernizations to policing technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover also established and expanded a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List. Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was also found to have routinely violated both the FBI's own policies and the very laws which the FBI was charged with enforcing, and to have collected evidence using illegal surveillance, wiretapping, and burglaries. Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was able to intimidate and threaten political figures, including high-ranking ones.

2. John F. Kennedy Jr. (1960 - 1999)

With an HPI of 58.88, John F. Kennedy Jr. is the 2nd most famous American Lawyer. His biography has been translated into 40 different languages.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. (November 25, 1960 – July 16, 1999), often referred to as John-John or JFK Jr., was an American attorney, journalist, and magazine publisher. He was a son of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and a younger brother of U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy. Three days after his father was assassinated, he rendered a final salute during the funeral procession on his third birthday. From his childhood years at the White House, Kennedy was the subject of much media scrutiny and later became a popular social figure in Manhattan. Trained as a lawyer, he worked as a New York City assistant district attorney for almost four years. In 1995, Kennedy launched George magazine, using his political and celebrity status to publicize it. He died in a plane crash in 1999 at the age of 38.

3. James B. Donovan (1916 - 1970)

With an HPI of 57.76, James B. Donovan is the 3rd most famous American Lawyer. His biography has been translated into 17 different languages.

James Britt Donovan (February 29, 1916 – January 19, 1970) was an American lawyer and United States Navy officer in the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency), ultimately becoming General Counsel of the OSS, and an international diplomatic negotiator. Donovan is widely known for negotiating the 1960–1962 exchange of captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and American student Frederic Pryor for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, and for negotiating the 1962 release and return of 9,703 prisoners held by Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. Donovan was portrayed by Tom Hanks in the 2015 feature film Bridge of Spies.

4. Warren Christopher (1925 - 2011)

With an HPI of 56.16, Warren Christopher is the 4th most famous American Lawyer. His biography has been translated into 41 different languages.

Warren Minor Christopher (October 27, 1925 – March 18, 2011) was an American lawyer, diplomat and politician. During Bill Clinton's first term as president, he served as the 63rd United States Secretary of State. Born in Scranton, North Dakota, Christopher clerked for Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas after graduating from Stanford Law School. He became a partner in the firm of O'Melveny & Myers and served as Deputy Attorney General from 1967 to 1969 under President Lyndon B. Johnson. He served as Deputy Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter, holding that position from 1977 to 1981. In 1991, he chaired the Christopher Commission, which investigated the Los Angeles Police Department in the wake of the Rodney King incident. During the 1992 presidential election, Christopher headed Bill Clinton's search for a running mate, and Clinton chose Senator Al Gore. After Clinton won the 1992 election, Christopher led the Clinton administration's transition process, and he took office as Secretary of State in 1993. As Secretary of State, Christopher sought to expand NATO, broker peace in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and pressure China regarding its human rights practices. He also helped negotiate the Dayton Agreement, which ended the Bosnian War. He left office in 1997, and was succeeded by Madeleine Albright. Christopher oversaw the Gore campaign's Florida recount effort in the aftermath of the disputed 2000 presidential election. At the time of his death in 2011, he was a senior partner at O'Melveny & Myers in the firm's Century City, California, office. He also served as a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

5. Bill Gates Sr. (1925 - 2020)

With an HPI of 56.03, Bill Gates Sr. is the 5th most famous American Lawyer. His biography has been translated into 19 different languages.

William Henry Gates II (November 30, 1925 – September 14, 2020), better known as Bill Gates Sr., was an American attorney, philanthropist, and civic leader. He was the founder of the law firm Shidler McBroom & Gates (a predecessor of K&L Gates), and also served as president of both the Seattle King County and Washington State Bar associations. He was the father of Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft.

6. Alan Dershowitz (1938 - )

With an HPI of 52.35, Alan Dershowitz is the 6th most famous American Lawyer. His biography has been translated into 27 different languages.

Alan Morton Dershowitz ( DURR-shə-wits; born September 1, 1938) is an American lawyer and law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst. Dershowitz has taken on high-profile and often unpopular causes and clients. As of 2009, he had won 13 of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases he handled as a criminal appellate lawyer. Dershowitz has represented such celebrity clients as Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Julian Assange, and Jim Bakker. Major legal victories have included two successful appeals that overturned convictions, first for Harry Reems in 1976, then in 1984 for Claus von Bülow, who had been convicted of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny. In 1995, Dershowitz served as the appellate adviser on the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, part of the legal "Dream Team", alongside Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. He was a member of Harvey Weinstein's defense team in 2018 and of President Donald Trump's defense team in his first impeachment trial in 2020. He was a member of Jeffrey Epstein's defense team and helped to negotiate a 2006 non-prosecution agreement on Epstein's behalf. Dershowitz is the author of several books about politics and the law, including Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case (1985), the basis of the 1990 film; Chutzpah (1991); Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O. J. Simpson Case (1996); The Case for Israel (2003); and The Case for Peace (2005). His two most recent works are The Case Against Impeaching Trump (2018) and Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo (2019). An ardent Zionist and supporter of Israel, he has written several books on the Arab–Israeli conflict.

7. Roy Cohn (1927 - 1986)

With an HPI of 50.24, Roy Cohn is the 7th most famous American Lawyer. Her biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Roy Marcus Cohn ( KOHN; February 20, 1927 – August 2, 1986) was an American lawyer and prosecutor who came to prominence for his role as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954, when he assisted McCarthy's investigations of suspected communists. In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, he became a prominent political fixer in New York City. He also represented and mentored New York City real estate developer and future U.S. President Donald Trump during his early business career. His other clients included New York Yankees baseball club owner George Steinbrenner, Aristotle Onassis, and Mafia bosses Fat Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti. Cohn was born in The Bronx in New York City and educated at Columbia University. He rose to prominence as a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, where he successfully prosecuted the Rosenbergs leading to their execution in 1953. As a prosecuting chief counsel during the McCarthy trials, his reputation deteriorated during the late 1950s to late 1970s after McCarthy's downfall. In 1986, he was disbarred by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court for unethical conduct after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing the client to sign a will amendment leaving him his fortune. He died five weeks later from AIDS-related complications, having vehemently denied that he had HIV.

8. Leo Frank (1884 - 1915)

With an HPI of 49.80, Leo Frank is the 8th most famous American Lawyer. His biography has been translated into 21 different languages.

Leo Max Frank (April 17, 1884 – August 17, 1915) was an American factory superintendent and lynching victim. He was convicted in 1913 of the murder of a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in Atlanta, Georgia. Frank's trial, conviction, and unsuccessful appeals attracted national attention. His kidnapping from prison and lynching became the focus of social, regional, political, and racial concerns, particularly regarding antisemitism. Modern researchers generally agree that Frank was wrongly convicted. Born to a Jewish-American family in Texas, Frank was raised in New York and earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University before moving to Atlanta in 1908. Marrying in 1910, he involved himself with the city's Jewish community and was elected president of the Atlanta chapter of the B'nai B'rith, a Jewish fraternal organization, in 1912. At that time, there were growing concerns regarding child labor at factories. One of these children was Mary Phagan, who worked at the National Pencil Company where Frank was director. The girl was strangled on April 26, 1913, and found dead in the factory's cellar the next morning. Two notes, made to look as if she had written them, were found beside her body. Based on the mention of a "night witch", they implicated the night watchman, Newt Lee. Over the course of their investigations, the police arrested several men, including Lee, Frank, and Jim Conley, a janitor at the factory. On May 24, 1913, Frank was indicted on a charge of murder and the case opened at Fulton County Superior Court, on July 28. The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Conley, who described himself as an accomplice in the aftermath of the murder, and who the defense at the trial argued was, in fact, the perpetrator of the murder. A guilty verdict was announced on August 25. Frank and his lawyers made a series of unsuccessful appeals; their final appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States failed in April 1915. Considering arguments from both sides as well as evidence not available at trial, Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence from capital punishment to life imprisonment. The case attracted national press attention and many reporters deemed the conviction a travesty. Within Georgia, this outside criticism fueled antisemitism and hatred toward Frank. On August 16, 1915, he was kidnapped from prison by a group of armed men, and lynched at Marietta, Mary Phagan's hometown, the next morning. The new governor vowed to punish the lynchers, who included prominent Marietta citizens, but nobody was charged. In 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a pardon in recognition of the state's failures—including to protect Frank and preserve his opportunity to appeal—but took no stance on Frank's guilt or innocence. The case has inspired books, movies, a play, a musical, and a TV miniseries. The African American press condemned the lynching, but many African Americans also opposed Frank and his supporters over what historian Nancy MacLean described as a "virulently racist" characterization of Jim Conley, who was Black. His case spurred the creation of the Anti-Defamation League and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

9. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841 - 1935)

With an HPI of 49.11, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is the 9th most famous American Lawyer. His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. Holmes is one of the most widely cited Supreme Court justices and among the most influential American judges in history, noted for his long service, pithy opinions—particularly those 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 Supreme Court. He previously served as a Brevet Colonel in the American Civil War, in which he was wounded three times, as an associate justice and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and as Weld Professor of Law at his alma mater, Harvard Law School. His positions, distinctive personality, and writing style made him a popular figure, especially with American progressives.During his tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, to which he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, he supported the constitutionality of state economic regulation and came to advocate broad freedom of speech under the First Amendment, after, in Schenck v. United States (1919), having upheld for a unanimous court criminal sanctions against draft protestors with the memorable maxim that "free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic" and formulating the groundbreaking "clear and present danger" test. Later that same year, in his famous dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919), he wrote that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.... That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment." He added that "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death...."He was one of only a handful of justices known as a scholar; The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Holmes as the third-most-cited American legal scholar of the 20th century. Holmes was a legal realist, as summed up in his maxim, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience", and a moral skeptic opposed to the doctrine of natural law. His jurisprudence and academic writing influenced much subsequent American legal thinking, including the judicial consensus upholding New Deal regulatory law and the influential American schools of pragmatism, critical legal studies, and law and economics.

10. William Rehnquist (1924 - 2005)

With an HPI of 48.77, William Rehnquist is the 10th most famous American Lawyer. His biography has been translated into 34 different languages.

William Hubbs Rehnquist ( REN-kwist; October 1, 1924 – September 3, 2005) was an American attorney and jurist who served on the U.S. Supreme Court for 33 years. Rehnquist was an associate justice from 1972 to 1986 and the 16th chief justice from 1986 until his death in 2005. Considered a staunch conservative, Rehnquist favored a conception of federalism that emphasized the Tenth Amendment's reservation of powers to the states. Under this view of federalism, the Court, for the first time since the 1930s, struck down an act of Congress as exceeding its power under the Commerce Clause. Rehnquist grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and served in the U.S. Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1946. Afterward, he studied political science at Stanford University and Harvard University, then attended Stanford Law School, where he was an editor of the Stanford Law Review and graduated first in his class. Rehnquist clerked for Justice Robert H. Jackson during the Supreme Court's 1952–1953 term, then entered private practice in Phoenix, Arizona. Rehnquist served as a legal adviser for Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in the 1964 U.S. presidential election, and President Richard Nixon appointed him U.S. Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel in 1969. In that capacity, he played a role in forcing Justice Abe Fortas to resign for accepting $20,000 from financier Louis Wolfson before Wolfson was convicted of selling unregistered shares. In 1971, Nixon nominated Rehnquist to succeed Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan II, and the U.S. Senate confirmed him that year. During his confirmation hearings, Rehnquist was criticized for allegedly opposing the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and allegedly taking part in voter suppression efforts targeting minorities as a lawyer in the early 1960s. Historians debate whether he committed perjury during the hearings by denying his suppression efforts despite at least ten witnesses to the acts, but it is known that at the very least he had defended segregation by private businesses in the early 1960s on the grounds of freedom of association. Rehnquist quickly established himself as the Burger Court's most conservative member. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan nominated Rehnquist to succeed retiring Chief Justice Warren Burger, and the Senate confirmed him. Rehnquist served as Chief Justice for nearly 19 years, making him the fourth-longest-serving chief justice and the eighth-longest-serving justice overall. He became an intellectual and social leader of the Rehnquist Court, earning respect even from the justices who frequently opposed his opinions. As Chief Justice, Rehnquist presided over the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Rehnquist wrote the majority opinions in United States v. Lopez (1995) and United States v. Morrison (2000), holding in both cases that Congress had exceeded its power under the Commerce Clause. He opposed Roe v. Wade (1973) and continued to argue that Roe had been incorrectly decided in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). In Bush v. Gore, he voted with the court's majority to end the Florida recount in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

People

Pantheon has 31 people classified as lawyers born between 1731 and 1966. Of these 31, 13 (41.94%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living lawyers include Alan Dershowitz, Lawrence Lessig, and Michael Cohen. The most famous deceased lawyers include J. Edgar Hoover, John F. Kennedy Jr., and James B. Donovan. As of April 2022, 4 new lawyers have been added to Pantheon including Merrick Garland, Doug Emhoff, and Robert Lighthizer.