A force in classroom and before the bench
Professor served as SJC justice
No issue loomed larger than abortion in Charles Fried’s long career, which brought him to the pinnacle of the legal community and academia. And with abortion, the longtime Harvard Law School professor allowed the public to see how his nuanced consideration of one of the nation’s most contentious and divisive debates evolved over the years.
As US solicitor general during the Reagan administration, Mr. Fried filed a 1985 brief with the US Supreme Court arguing that Roe v. Wade, the ruling that recognized a constitutional right to an abortion, was “so far flawed that this court should overrule it.”
Then in 1992, after returning to teach at Harvard, he moved to the left of many conservatives by applauding the court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld abortion restrictions, but affirmed the basic right. “Casey is just right,” Mr. Fried later told The New York Times. “The law of abortion has become much more nuanced. It’s appropriately flexible.”
But in 2021, as current conservative Supreme Court justices headed toward overturning Roe, Mr. Fried took a position that surely angered conservatives who once considered him one of their own. “To overturn Roe now would be an act of constitutional vandalism — not conservative, but reactionary,” he wrote in a Times op-ed.
Mr. Fried, who had been seeking a publisher for a book he completed in December about those who, like him, change their minds and hearts on significant matters, was 88 when he died Tuesday, Harvard Law School said. The school’s announcement did not say where he died and noted that
the cause has not been made public.
Along with serving as solicitor general in the late 1980s, Mr. Fried formerly was a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court associate justice.
He had announced several weeks ago that he planned to retire from Harvard Law School on July 1.
“Charles was a great lawyer, who brought the discipline of philosophy to bear on the hardest legal problems, while always keeping in view that law must do the important work of ordering our society and structuring the way we solve problems and make progress in a constitutional democracy,” John Manning, dean of Harvard Law School, wrote in a message to the faculty.
Laurence Tribe, a law school professor emeritus, posted on the X social media platform that “a great man has died. We will not see anyone like Charles Fried again.”
Mr. Fried was an adviser to the Harvard Federalist Society, whose president, Benjamin Pontz, posted a tribute praising his embrace of good humor, good manners, and good food.
“To me, Charles Fried embodied the summum bonum of academic life,” Pontz said. “He was a polymath, and he was a patriot. I’ll remember his commitment to decorum, to debate, and to dessert.”
Manning called Mr. Fried an “extraordinary human who never stopped trying new things, charting new paths, and bringing along others with him.”
Many critics did not follow Mr. Fried down those new avenues, however.
Linda Greenhouse, the Times’s Supreme Court reporter when Mr. Fried was solicitor general, wrote in 1989 that during his years in that job he “usually managed to have somebody mad at him.”
And while “often it was liberals,” given his opposition then to abortion, Greenhouse wrote, “he angered conservatives, too,” notably when Mr. Friend declined to file a supporting brief for a Texas law criminalizing burning the US flag.
When Governor William Weld nominated Mr. Fried in 1995 to serve on the SJC, he praised him as a “true legal giant.”
“His mind can travel with agility and wit down roads that others find impassable,” Weld said at a news conference.
In a 5-4 vote, the Governor’s Council confirmed the nomination in 1995 and Mr. Fried served until mid-1999, when he returned to his Harvard Law School professorship.
Opponents had tried to derail Mr. Fried’s appointment, significantly over his record on abortion. “We think Charles Fried would be totally unpredictable on the choice issue,” said Nicki Nichols Gamble, then-president of Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts.
While being questioned by the council, however, Mr. Fried had said he believed “in a woman’s right to choose. A regime that makes abortions illegal leads to illegal abortions. That is cruel.”
Mr. Fried’s most publicly discussed opinion during his time as an SJC justice was not about abortion. He wrote the court’s March 1997 decision that three members of the Amirault family were properly convicted of sexually abusing children at the Fells Acres day care center.
While the case was flawed because the Amiraults were not allowed to confront their accusers face-to-face in court, Mr. Fried wrote, they were not entitled to a new trial because their lawyers didn’t press that issue during the trial or in an initial appeal.
Meanwhile, he incurred the ire of defense lawyers by writing that the public also deserved a sense of “finality” in the case.
Born in Prague on April 15, 1935, Mr. Fried was the son of Marta and Anthony Fried. His Jewish family fled Czechoslovakia during World War II.
“I am a refugee,” Mr. Fried said while participating in a 2023 Harvard Law discussion about the panelists’ experiences changing their minds on significant issues. “I left Czechoslovakia with Hitler as my travel agent in 1939.”
His family settled in New York City and Mr. Fried graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, studied at Oxford University in England, and graduated from Columbia Law School.
He then clerked for John Marshall Harlan II, a US Supreme Court associate justice, before joining Harvard Law School’s faculty in 1961.
Mr. Fried married Anne Summerscale in 1959, according to a 1985 Times profile, just after he was sworn in as solicitor general. She survives him, as do their children, Gregory and Antonia, and their grandchildren, the Harvard Law Record said in its obit.
Information about a memorial service was not immediately available.
To the end, Mr. Fried was often in the news, including last month, when he wrote about the appearance before a US House committee by Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president who has since resigned.
In an opinion piece for The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, he defended Gay’s comments before the congressional panel that the free speech context of a hypothetical student’s call for the genocide of Jews would matter in a disciplinary decision.
“If one seeks to follow constitutional principles, answering this question certainly does depend on the context,” he wrote.
Mr. Fried also regularly showed he could coin quotable sentences, as he did in a letter to the New York Review of Books, saying it was too mild to call the current US Supreme Court “conservative.”
“The correct term is ‘reactionary,’ " he wrote, “and the best description of what they are doing is a program to repeal the 20th century.”
In a video of the 2023 panel discussion about changing minds, Mr. Fried invoked philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”
“Why is it that people are reluctant to admit that they have changed? Why is that? Well, maybe they’re afraid they won’t be trusted,” Mr. Fried said. “And maybe they’re afraid they won’t be believed … so they say things that they don’t believe any more in order to be believed.”
Doing that, he added, is “a mistake.”