Charles Fried, lawyer who broke with conservatives, dies at age 88

Charles Fried, a conservative legal scholar who, as President Ronald Reagan's attorney general, argued against abortion rights and affirmative action at the Supreme Court — but who later rejected the right-wing march of the conservative legal movement and called the current Supreme Court “reactionary” — died Tuesday at 1 p.m. o'clock. his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 88.

His death was announced by Harvard Law School, where Mr. Fried taught many thousands of students beginning in 1961, including a future Supreme Court justice, Stephen G. Breyer, and a future governor of Massachusetts, William F. Weld.

Mr. Fried (pronounced “free”) was a son of Jewish parents who fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 to escape Nazism, and whose hopes of returning home after the war were thwarted by the fall of the Iron Curtain. He traced his political conservatism both to that background and to the far-left atmosphere prevalent at Harvard Law School in the 1970s, which, he recalled, included Marxist study groups led by the faculty.

He became “quite allergic to the left,” Mr. Fried said a law school last year. “And that allergy took a form that I kind of wanted to fight against. And what better way to be in opposition than to join the Reagan administration?”

In 1985, as attorney general — the White House representative before the Supreme Court — Mr. Fried argued that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. But later he changed his mind. Because it seemed likely that the Republican-appointed supermajority of the Supreme Court would overturn Roe, Mr. Fried wrote in an opinion column for The New York Times in 2021: “To overturn Roe now would be an act of constitutional vandalism.”

His reasoning was that a 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, had more firmly established the right to abortion than when he opposed it in the Reagan White House.

During last year's Harvard panel, titled “Why I Changed My Mind,” Mr. Fried said that his intellectual evolution from conservative to moderate was also shaped by conversations with his adult children and grandchildren. “We talk, and I have to listen as well as talk,” he said. “So over the course of that, it changed me.”

Although Mr. Fried testified before the nomination of John G. Roberts as Chief Justice in 2005, he became an outspoken critic of the Roberts Court for its rulings that limited voting rights, labor unions, and campaign finance reform, as well as its refusal to limit blatant partisan gerrymandering.

He called those decisions “reactionary, not conservative,” in the classic sense of conservatism as respect for precedent and a belief in change that is incremental and not radical.

Judge Breyer, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton and retired in 2022, suggested in a statement that Mr. Fried was willing to change his views because of his innate intellectual honesty.

“Charles loved ideas,” he said. “He tried them out on his colleagues and friends, discarding some, developing others, and always listening to the thoughts of others.”

Mr. Fried's academic interests include how moral and political philosophy shed light on legal problems; he wrote several books on the subject, including 'An Anatomy of Values' (1970) and 'Right and Wrong' (1978).

Mr. Fried, a longtime Republican who advised the Harvard chapter of the conservative Federalist Society for four decades, was a particularly strident critic of President Donald J. Trump's contempt for courts and the law, and of the Justice Department under his second attorney general, William. P.Barr.

Mr. Fried and other Republican and conservative lawyers, members of a group called Checks & Balances, publicly denounced Mr. Barr for defending Mr. Trump's efforts to obstruct the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and, in 2019 , to put pressure on Ukraine – which led to Trump's first impeachment.

“The people who claim to be conservative today are demanding loyalty to this completely lawless, ignorant, foul-mouthed president,” Mr. Fried told The Times in 2019. In 2016, he revealed this in The Boston Globe he planned to vote for Hillary Clinton.

During Mr. Trump's second impeachment trial, for incitement of insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Fried joined other constitutional lawyers in a statement calling out Mr. Trump's defense team's claims that his conduct was protected “legally frivolous” by the First Amendment. ”

Charles Fried was born Karel Fried on April 15, 1935 in Prague, the son of Antony and Martha Fried. His father was a senior vice president at Skoda Works, a manufacturer of heavy machinery and weapons. The family fled to England — “with Hitler as my travel agent,” as Mr. Fried once put it — where they lived for two years before moving to New York City in 1941.

(When the communist government in Prague collapsed during the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Mr. Fried, along with other Western lawyers, advised the Czech government on a new constitution.)

After graduating from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, he received a BA in modern languages ​​and literature from Princeton in 1956. He studied law and philosophy on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Oxford and then graduated from Columbia Law School in 1960.

He clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II and joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1961, at the age of 26. Mr. Breyer was in his first class, criminal justice.

The Reagan administration recruited Mr. Fried when he was 50, based in part on issue papers he had written for the 1980 Reagan campaign, including how to express his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment in a presidential debate .

Excluding his years as attorney general, from 1985 to 1989, and a stint as an associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court from 1995 to 1999 (he was appointed by his former student, Governor Weld), Mr. Fried spent nearly 60 years on the Harvard Law School faculty.

In 1993, while at Harvard, he argued a Supreme Court case, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, which established standards for expert scientific testimony in federal courts.

His survivors include his wife Anne Summerscale, whom he married in 1959; a son, Gregory, professor of philosophy at Boston College; and a daughter, Antonia Fried, a psychologist.

Mr. Fried announced his retirement in December, though he said he planned to continue dealing with the legal and political issues of the time.

“What am I planning to do now?” he said. “What I always do here, except for the lessons. I write, I attend workshops, I read the work of my colleagues, I comment on it and then I write my own work.”

That same month, in a column in The Harvard Crimson, Mr. Fried defended the university's president, Claudine Gay, after she came under fire for her response to anti-Semitism on campus.

He continued to defend her after the attacks extended to Dr. Gay. He told The Times that he had criticized allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay, because they were part of a 'far-right attack on elite institutions'.

Dr. Gay resigned in January after further pressure and accusations of plagiarism.