Called to the bar in 1668, Jeffreys rose to prominence through vigorous activity and astute cultivation of business and political contacts. As recorder of London and later Chief Justice of Chester, his royalist sympathies were apparent in his decisions and opinions, and Charles II made him a baronet in 1681. In 1683 he was appointed to the king's bench, where he presided over some of the proceedings consequent on the Rye House plot to assassinate Charles II as well as a large number of prosecutions for seditious libel.

Minimally successful in the legal profession for which he was trained, Jeffrey found his calling in 1802 when he and a few of his friends founded the Edinburgh Review, with Jeffrey taking over as editor in 1803. Though Jeffrey often expressed literary views vigorously unsympathetic to the Romantic authors of his day, espousing judgments that have not stood the test of time, he remains a major figure in the history of literary criticism, journalism, and the development of the modern periodical.

Known in English as John the Blind or John of Luxembourg, Jan Lucemburský was King of Bohemia from 1310 to his death in 1346 at the Battle of Crécy during the Hundred Years' War.

Travel writer, art historian, and feminist Anna Brownell Jameson pursued her varied and prolific writing career by necessity. Daughter of a miniature painter, by age 16 she was already helping to support her family as a governess. In one of her assignments she toured France and Italy with her employer, resulting in her first significant publication, A Lady’s Diary (1826), a fictionalized account of her travels that was republished by Henry Colburn as Diary of an Ennuyée later the same year. In 1825 she married Robert Jameson but separated from him a few years later.

Known as the "Old Pretender," or James Edward, James Francis Edward Stuart was the son of King James II and Prince of Wales until his father's deposition in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. James Edward became the claimant to the throne after his father's death in 1701 as James III of England and Ireland and James VIII of Scotland. With the support of his Jacobite followers and King Louis XIV of France, his father's cousin, James Edward made a few attempts to reclaim the crown.

- Brother to Charles II, James succeeded him to the throne in 1685. A convert to Catholicism, he made sweeping legal decisions consolidating royal power and extending tolerance to and empowering Catholics, leading to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which placed the Dutch Protestant William of Orange on the British throne.

Son of Mary, Queen of Scots, King James VI of Scotland became King of England in 1603 with the death of Elizabeth I.

James I of Scotland spent much of his early life as a prisoner of the English, then part of the household of Henry V. He returned to Scotland and was crowned in 1424. Thereafter he exercised a strong, even despotic, royal hand in a country that had long been dominated by semi-autonomous lords, meanwhile extending his international influence through both marital alliances and successful warfare. His methods compromised Scottish internal stability, however, and in a February 1437 coup attempt he was attacked, cornered, and, after a desperate fight, killed.

English legal writer, poet, and biographer best remembered for his A New Law Dictionary (1729) which became the most popular of its kind in the newly-independent United States. Jacob is also remembered for his collection of biographies, Poetical Register, or Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets, (2 vols., 1719–20). However, Jacob's literary works were not as well-received as his legal ones, and he feuded with Alexander Pope publicly and in writing, culminating in Pope making Jacob a dunce in the 1728 edition of his The Dunciad.

Student contributor.