Legendary legal scholar and Harvard Law professor Charles Fried passed away Tuesday at the age of 88. The cause of death is not yet public.
Born to Jewish “Czech patriots” Antony and Martha in 1935, Professor Fried charted a decorated path seldom matched in the legal profession. His family fled Czechoslovakia during the Nazi invasion in the late 1930s, resettling first in England, for which he attributed his “vaguely British” cadence throughout his life. They moved to New York City in 1941, where he attended public school during adolescence.
After graduating from Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, he completed his education at a series of blue-ribbon institutions. Earning a bachelor’s degree in modern languages and literature from Princeton in 1956, then a Bachelor’s from Oxford in 1958, followed by a master’s of jurisprudence in 1960, and finally a law degree from Columbia Law School in 1960.
Following a clerkship with celebrated Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II, the prodigious Fried began his 60+ year tenure on the Harvard Law School faculty in 1961. A professor at the age of 26, his first class was criminal law, in which he would teach future Supreme Court Justice and Harvard Law Professor Stephen Breyer, J.D. ’64.
Following his first publicatio, Anatomy of Values (1970), he was awarded the coveted Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971. Deeply affected by the Soviet Union’s obstruction of his return to Czechoslovakia, Fried’s conservative sensibilities placed him in tension with the liberal consensus of the late New Deal era. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he produced a vast and distinctive catalog of scholarship, through which he soon established himself as a leading voice in legal academia.
Charles Fried embodied the summum bonum of academic life
Admitted to “to the bars of the United States Supreme Court, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts” and several federal circuits, Fried served as counsel for several firms throughout his illustrious career.
His talents soon caught the eye of president Ronald Reagan, and after a brief stint as deputy, Fried was nominated as Solicitor General of the United States in 1985. During his four years in the position, he represented the United States in 25 cases before the Supreme Court before returning to Harvard Law. As lead lawyer for the Reagan administration he represented a number of contentious positions, notably arguing in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade; he would later disavow this position in a New York Times piece in 2021.
One of his most memorable appearances before the Court came in 1993, when he argued the landmark case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. Delivering a victory for his client, the case revolutionized the reliability standards for scientific expert testimony. This achievement was soon followed by a four year tenure on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1995-1999.
Apart from Fried’s erudite prose and extraordinary resume, Fried was a beloved mentor and colleague to thousands of students and scores of peers.
Former Harvard University president Derek Bok, J.D. ’54, said Fried was one of the “happiest sort of friends” that he made at Harvard. Highest ranking faculty member Annette Gordon Reed, J.D. ’84, described Fried as “one of the kindest and most charming people I’ve ever met” on Tuesday.
As former student Colin W. Kubacki, HLS ’24. put it, Fried possessed a “massive command of the liberal arts,” with a deep devotion to the classics. With a flair for the theatrical and a tendency to sprinkle Latin phrases throughout his eloquent lectures, Fried made an indelible impression on several generations of lawyers.
a wonderfully open mind to anything and everything that comes into it.
The influential professor served as faculty adviser to the Harvard Federalist Society for four decades, essentially overseeing its development at HLS for nearly its entire existence. The current president, Benjamin Pontz, HLS 24’, remarked in a statement: “ Charles Fried embodied the summum bonum of academic life. He was a polymath, and he was a patriot.”
Fried had recently announced his plans to retire in July last fall, and concluded his final class in December. Many past students, mentees, and friends joined his final class to show their appreciation for his many contributions.
Despite retiring, he never stopped philosophizing about the life and knowledge, remarking that he intended to continue doing “what he always [did] here…I write, I go to workshops, I read my colleagues’ work, I comment on it, and then I write my own work.” He had just recently completed “a book about his own and other people’s change of heart” in December, and was looking for a publisher at the time.
His final op-ed in any publication was a December 12 article defending Claudine Gay from criticism and emphasizing the importance of free speech at all universities, private and public.
President Bok, whom Fried cites approvingly in the aforementioned article, described Fried as possessing “a wonderfully open mind to anything and everything that comes into it.”
Charles Fried is survived by his wife Anne, his son Gregory, his daughter Antonia, and his grandchildren.