Thinkers Timeline

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and writer. He is one of the most influential figures in the history of Western law and political thought. He was born on 3 January 106 BCE in Arpinum, a small town about 70 miles south-east of Rome. His family was wealthy but not noble. They belonged to the equestrian class, the second tier of Roman society below the senators. His parents wanted him to rise. They sent him to Rome and then to Greece for the best education available. He studied law, rhetoric (the art of public speaking), and philosophy. By his mid-twenties he was working as a lawyer in Rome. He rose quickly. He became famous for his speeches in court cases. In 63 BCE, at the age of 43, he was elected consul, the highest political office in Rome. That year he uncovered the Catiline Conspiracy, a plot to overthrow the Roman state. The Senate executed the conspirators on Cicero's authority. The Romans gave him the title 'Father of the Country'. His later career was difficult. He was exiled briefly in 58 BCE. The Roman Republic was collapsing. Julius Caesar took dictatorial power. After Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, Cicero attacked Mark Antony in a series of fierce speeches called the Philippics. Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate and made lists of enemies to be killed. Cicero was on the list. He was caught and executed on 7 December 43 BCE, aged 63. His severed head and hands were displayed in the Roman Forum.

Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist, philosopher, and diplomat. He is often called the father of international law. He was born on 10 April 1583 in Delft, in the Netherlands. His Dutch name was Huig de Groot. The Latin form, Grotius, is the name he is now known by in most of the world. His family was educated and well-connected. His father had been mayor of Delft and a curator of Leiden University. Grotius was a child prodigy. He entered Leiden University at age eleven. He earned a doctorate in law in France at fifteen. He published his first books in his teens. He became a working lawyer and politician in his twenties. By thirty he was one of the most respected scholars in Europe. His political career ended badly. The Netherlands in his time was torn by religious and political conflict. Grotius supported one faction. When the other side won, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1619 in Loevestein Castle. After almost two years, his wife smuggled him out in a chest of books. He fled to Paris. It was in Paris, in 1625, that he published his masterpiece: De Jure Belli ac Pacis, On the Law of War and Peace. The book established the foundations of modern international law. Europe at the time was tearing itself apart in the Thirty Years War. Grotius wanted to find rules that could limit the violence and bring some order to relations between nations. He later served as Sweden's ambassador to France. He died on 28 August 1645 in Rostock, Germany, after his ship was wrecked on the Baltic coast. He was 62.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a French lawyer and political thinker. He was born in 1689 at the family castle of La Brède, near Bordeaux in southwest France. His family belonged to the lesser nobility. He studied law and worked as a judge in the Bordeaux high court for twelve years. The work was tedious, but it gave him a deep first-hand knowledge of how laws and courts actually function. In 1721 he became famous, almost by surprise, with the Persian Letters. The book is a comic novel about two Persian travellers in France who write letters home about French customs. Through their puzzled outsider eyes, Montesquieu mocked French society, religion, and politics. The book was a bestseller across Europe. Soon Montesquieu sold his judge's office, joined the French Academy, and turned to full-time writing. For the next twenty years he travelled, read, and worked on his great book. He spent over a year in England, watching parliament and the courts. He read history and travel writing from many parts of the world. The result was The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748. It was a vast comparative study of government across many cultures and times. The book was banned by the Catholic Church but read everywhere. Montesquieu died in 1755 in Paris. His ideas, especially about separating the powers of government, would shape the United States Constitution forty years later, and constitutional thought ever since.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935) was an American jurist, legal philosopher, and Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into one of the most distinguished intellectual families in America — his father was the poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. He was educated at Harvard and served in the Union Army during the Civil War, where he was wounded three times, experiences that left him with a lifelong sense of the fragility of certainties and the cost of ideology. He practised law, taught at Harvard Law School, served on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, where he served for nearly thirty years until retiring in 1932 at the age of ninety. He was one of the most influential jurists in American history. His major works include The Common Law (1881), in which he argued that the life of the law has not been logic but experience, and hundreds of opinions on the Supreme Court, including celebrated dissents in free speech cases that shaped twentieth-century First Amendment jurisprudence.

Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin was a Haitian lawyer, politician, and pioneering anthropologist. He may be the first Black anthropologist in history. He was born on 18 October 1850 in Cap-Haïtien, in the north of Haiti, to a working-class family. Haiti had been independent for only 46 years. The country was still recovering from the revolution and from the huge payments France had demanded for recognising its freedom. Firmin was a brilliant student. He taught himself Greek, Latin, and French, which he later taught to others. He studied law and became a lawyer by 1875. He was active in liberal politics. He founded a newspaper, Le Messager du Nord, which supported reform. Political turmoil pushed him into government service and then abroad. In 1883, he was appointed Haitian ambassador to France and moved to Paris. While in Paris, a French doctor invited him to join the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, the leading anthropology society of its day. He attended meetings regularly. But the society was dominated by racist 'scientific' theories that claimed white people were superior. Firmin sat through meeting after meeting, knowing the other members saw him as inferior. He tried to speak only twice. Both times he was cut off or insulted. So he wrote a book instead. De l'égalité des races humaines (The Equality of the Human Races) appeared in 1885. It was 662 pages long and had taken him eighteen months to write. It systematically destroyed the racist anthropology of his time. It was almost completely ignored. Firmin returned to Haiti and had a difficult political career. He served as foreign minister, ran for president twice, and led two failed revolts. He died in exile on the island of St. Thomas on 19 September 1911, aged 60. His book was only rediscovered and translated into English in 2000, 115 years after it was written.

B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer, and philosopher. His full name was Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. He was born into a Dalit family, the community then called Untouchables, who occupied the lowest position in India's caste hierarchy and were subjected to severe discrimination, exclusion, and violence. Despite the enormous obstacles placed in front of him by the caste system, Ambedkar became one of the most educated people in India of his generation, earning doctorates from Columbia University in New York and the London School of Economics. He spent his life fighting against caste as a system of oppression and arguing for the full rights and dignity of Dalit people. He was the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, which he designed to protect the rights of all citizens and to prohibit caste discrimination. In the last year of his life, he converted to Buddhism along with hundreds of thousands of his followers, an act he understood as both a spiritual choice and a rejection of the Hindu caste system. He died in 1956, just weeks after completing his final manuscript.

Thurgood Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and the first Black Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He spent his life using the law to dismantle racial segregation in America. He was born Thoroughgood Marshall on 2 July 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. He shortened the name to Thurgood at age six because his classmates teased him about it. His father William was a railroad porter; his mother Norma was a school teacher. As a teenager Marshall got into trouble at school. As punishment he was made to read the United States Constitution. The exercise changed his life. He saw clearly the gap between the Constitution's promises of equality and the racist 'Jim Crow' laws that ruled the American South. He wanted to study law at the University of Maryland, the public university of his home state. He was rejected because he was Black. He went instead to Howard University, a historically Black school in Washington, D.C. He graduated first in his class in 1933. His main mentor at Howard was Charles Hamilton Houston, who taught his students that law could be used as a tool for social change. In 1936 Marshall joined the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He became its chief lawyer. From 1940 he led the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Over twenty-five years he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29. He won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. President Lyndon Johnson nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1967. He served for 24 years. He retired in 1991 and died on 24 January 1993, aged 84.

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African lawyer, freedom fighter, and statesman. He led the long struggle to end apartheid, the racist system that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. He was born on 18 July 1918 in Mvezo, a small village in the Eastern Cape. He was given the name Rolihlahla, which in Xhosa roughly means 'pulling the branch of a tree' or, informally, 'troublemaker'. A teacher gave him the English name Nelson when he started school. He came from a Thembu royal family. His father died when Nelson was nine, and he was raised at the royal court. He trained as a lawyer in Johannesburg. With his friend Oliver Tambo, he opened the first Black law firm in South Africa in 1952. Black South Africans had almost no rights under apartheid. They could not vote, were forced to live in poor 'townships', and had to carry passes to enter white areas. Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1943. He helped lead peaceful campaigns through the 1950s. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when police killed 69 unarmed Black protesters, he changed his mind about non-violence. In 1961 he co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC. He was arrested in 1962 and put on trial for sabotage. In 1964 he was sentenced to life in prison. He served 27 years, mostly on Robben Island. He was released on 11 February 1990. He led the negotiations that ended apartheid. He became South Africa's first democratically elected president in 1994. He died on 5 December 2013, aged 95.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and Supreme Court Justice. She is widely seen as one of the most important legal advocates for gender equality in modern history. She was born Joan Ruth Bader on 15 March 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. Her family was Jewish, with roots in Eastern Europe. They were not wealthy. Her mother Celia died of cancer the day before Ruth's high school graduation. She studied at Cornell University, where she met Martin Ginsburg. They married in 1954. The marriage lasted 56 years. Marty Ginsburg was an extraordinary support to her career. He was a tax lawyer, a brilliant cook, and her closest friend. Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine women in a class of over 500 men. She transferred to Columbia Law School to be with Marty in New York and graduated joint top of her class. Despite her record, she could not find a Supreme Court clerkship. Law firms often refused to hire her. She was, she later said, 'a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot'. She became a law professor at Rutgers, then Columbia. In 1972 she co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). As its head she argued six cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five. President Carter appointed her to a federal appeals court in 1980. President Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1993. She served there for 27 years until her death from pancreatic cancer on 18 September 2020, aged 87. She was the second woman ever to serve on the Court.

Harriet McBryde Johnson was an American lawyer, writer, and disability rights activist. She was one of the sharpest writers on disability in English. She was born on 8 July 1957 in Laurinburg, North Carolina. Both her parents were college teachers. She was one of five children. A sister also had the same progressive neuromuscular disease that Harriet herself lived with. The disease affected her muscles throughout her life. From an early age, she used a motorised wheelchair. She needed help with many daily tasks. She was an activist from her teens. As a young student, she tried to get an abusive teacher fired. She later described this as the start of her 'hell-raising'. She studied history at Charleston Southern University, earned a master's degree in public administration, and then a law degree from the University of South Carolina in 1985. She lived most of her life in Charleston, South Carolina. As a lawyer, she specialised in helping poor disabled clients claim Social Security benefits. This was quiet, unglamorous work. It kept her close to the realities of disabled lives most people ignored. She was also active in politics, serving as chair of the Charleston County Democratic Party. She described herself, with her usual humour, as 'a disabled, liberal, atheistic Democrat' and as 'a bedpan crip'. She became nationally famous in 2003 when The New York Times Magazine published her essay 'Unspeakable Conversations'. It described her debate the year before with the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that parents should be allowed to kill severely disabled babies. The essay was sharp, funny, and serious. It made her one of the most important voices in American disability thought. She later wrote a memoir, Too Late to Die Young (2005), and a novel for young adults, Accidents of Nature (2006). She died on 4 June 2008, aged 50.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American legal scholar and civil rights lawyer. She is one of the most influential thinkers on race, gender, and the law in the past fifty years. She was born on 5 May 1959 in Canton, Ohio. Her parents were both educated and active in local politics. This family background shaped her strong interest in civil rights from an early age. She studied at Cornell University, where she earned a degree in government and Africana studies in 1981. She then went to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1984. At Harvard she and other students pushed the school to hire more professors of colour and to offer more classes on race and law. She then earned a Master of Laws at the University of Wisconsin in 1985 and worked for a Wisconsin Supreme Court judge. In 1986, at age 27, she joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law. She has taught there ever since. Since 1995, she has also held a position at Columbia Law School in New York. She now splits her time between the two coasts. In a 1989 article, she introduced the word 'intersectionality'. This simple word has spread across universities, courtrooms, and activist movements around the world. She is also one of the founders of critical race theory, a field that studies how law and race shape each other. In 1996 she co-founded the African American Policy Forum. In 2014 she launched the #SayHerName campaign. She is still active today as a scholar, teacher, podcaster, and public speaker.