The 15 Most Influential Supreme Court Justices in History

What influence actually looks like

Influence on the Supreme Court leaves physical evidence. It looks like an opinion that lower courts must cite. It looks like a test, a framework, a phrase that later justices cannot write around. This ranking follows that evidence. Montgomery Kosma's 1998 study in the Journal of Legal Studies counted more than 1.2 million citations to over 24,000 opinions of the Court from 1793 to 1991, treating citations as a proxy for an opinion's continuing value. Fowler and Jeon's 2008 network analysis in Political Analysis mapped which precedents hold the web of case law together. Both methods, built independently, keep finding the same names: Marshall, Holmes, Brennan, Story, Brandeis.

The framework pays no attention to which president appointed a justice. Warren was appointed by a Republican. Brennan was appointed by the same Republican. Black was appointed by a Democrat and Scalia by a Republican, and all four sit in the top eight because the law still obeys what they wrote. If that pattern produces discomfort in either political camp, the discomfort belongs to the camp, not the data.

Marshall stands alone

The gap between first and second place is the largest on the list. When John Marshall took the center chair in 1801, the Supreme Court had no building, little docket, and less prestige. John Jay had declined reappointment as chief justice in 1800, writing that the Court lacked energy, weight, and dignity. Marshall answered that in 34 years. Marbury v. Madison (1803) established that courts say what the law is. McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) established implied federal powers and the supremacy of federal law. Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) built the commerce power that the modern regulatory state stands on.

Marshall also changed how the Court speaks. Before him, justices issued separate seriatim opinions. Marshall pushed the Court toward a single opinion of the Court, usually written by him. He authored more than 500 opinions during his tenure (Supreme Court Historical Society). Every justice since has worked inside the institution Marshall built. That is the definition of influence, and no one else on this list can match its scale.

The power of the vindicated dissent

Three of the top ten earned their rank partly by losing. Holmes lost in Lochner v. New York (1905); his dissent became the governing view of economic regulation after 1937. Harlan lost alone in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); his color-blind Constitution arrived in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 43 years after his death. Brandeis lost in Olmstead v. United States (1928); his privacy dissent was adopted in Katz v. United States (1967).

This is why the methodology counts vindicated dissents as influence. A dissent that the full Court later adopts is a doctrine with a delayed start date. Hugo Black's Adamson dissent in 1947 argued that the Fourteenth Amendment applies the Bill of Rights to the states. The Court never adopted his total incorporation theory in one stroke, but by the 1960s it had incorporated nearly every major provision case by case, and Black wrote several of those opinions himself, including Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). The record shows the Court moved to Black, not Black to the Court.

Method as a fingerprint

Two justices on this list are ranked chiefly for changing how every case is argued, not for a single holding. Antonin Scalia is the clearest modern example. Before Scalia, legislative history dominated statutory interpretation and originalism was a fringe academic position. After three decades of his opinions and dissents, briefs on both sides of nearly every major case now argue text and original meaning first. District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) is his landmark holding, but the method is the larger fingerprint. Justice Kagan's much-quoted 2015 remark that we are all textualists now, whatever its later qualifications, described a real shift in practice.

Felix Frankfurter is the mirror image. His doctrine of judicial restraint and his political question framework defined the terms of debate for the mid-century Court, even where he lost, as in Baker v. Carr (1962). Joseph Story worked the same way a century earlier: Martin v. Hunter's Lessee (1816) settled the Court's power over state courts, and his Commentaries trained the lawyers who then argued before it. Method outlives membership.

Who just missed, and why

Honest rankings show their close calls. Roger Taney authored Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), arguably the most consequential opinion ever issued, but consequence through repudiation is not influence; the Fourteenth Amendment exists to erase his doctrine, and no court cites him for authority. Byron White wrote more than 990 opinions across 31 years but left no governing doctrine of his own. Sandra Day O'Connor controlled outcomes for two decades, yet her case-by-case balancing tests, such as the undue burden standard of Casey (1992), were dismantled within 20 years of her retirement, most directly by Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022). Thurgood Marshall's world-historical influence came primarily as an advocate who won Brown, before he joined the Court.

Sitting justices are excluded by rule. Several will likely qualify in time. The evidence is not in yet, and this list only ranks evidence.

One more exclusion deserves a plain statement. Charles Evans Hughes served twice, as associate justice from 1910 to 1916 and as chief justice from 1930 to 1941, and steered the Court through the 1937 court-packing crisis. That was institutional leadership of the highest order, and it earns him a high place in a ranking of chief justices. But this list measures jurisprudential fingerprints, opinions and doctrines that still govern, and by that specific ruler his authored output trails the fifteen names above. Different questions produce different lists. This report answers exactly one question: whose written law still runs the country. The citation databases, the surviving doctrines, and the United States Reports supply the answer, and the answer does not care whose portrait hangs where.