Charles Fried, a conservative authorized scholar who as President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor common argued towards abortion rights and affirmative motion earlier than the Supreme Court — however who later rejected the conservative authorized motion’s rightward march, calling the present excessive court docket “reactionary” — died on Tuesday at his dwelling in Cambridge, Mass. He was 88.
His demise was introduced by Harvard Law School, the place Mr. Fried taught many hundreds of scholars starting in 1961, amongst them a future Supreme Court justice, Stephen G. Breyer, and a future Massachusetts governor, William F. Weld.
Mr. Fried (pronounced “freed”) was a son of Jewish dad and mom who fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 to flee Naziism, and whose hopes of returning dwelling after the struggle have been thwarted by the descent of the Iron Curtain. He traced his political conservatism each to that background and to the hard-left ambiance prevailing at Harvard Law School within the Nineteen Seventies, which, he recalled, included faculty-led Marxist research teams.
He grew to become “quite allergic to the left,” Mr. Fried stated at a regulation faculty panel final yr. “And that allergy took a form where I wanted to be rather in opposition. And what better way to be in opposition than to go into the Reagan administration?”
In 1985, as solicitor common — the White House’s consultant earlier than the Supreme Court — Mr. Fried argued that Roe v. Wade ought to be overturned. But he later modified his thoughts. As the excessive court docket’s Republican-appointed supermajority seemed prone to reverse Roe, Mr. Fried wrote in 2021 in an opinion column for The New York Times, “To overturn Roe now would be an act of constitutional vandalism.”
His reasoning was {that a} 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, had extra firmly established the proper to abortion than when he opposed it for the Reagan White House.
At the Harvard panel final yr, titled “Why I Changed My Mind,” Mr. Fried stated his mental evolution from conservative to reasonable had additionally been formed by conversations together with his grownup kids and grandchildren. “We talk, and I have to listen as well as talk,” he stated. “So, in the course of that, it has changed me.”
Although Mr. Fried testified in favor of the affirmation of John G. Roberts as chief justice in 2005, he grew to become an outspoken critic of the Roberts court docket over its rulings limiting voting rights, labor unions and marketing campaign finance reform, in addition to its refusal to restrict blatant partisan gerrymandering.
He referred to as these selections “reactionary, not conservative,” within the classical sense of conservatism as respect for precedent and a perception in change that’s incremental and never radical.
Justice Breyer, who was appointed to the excessive court docket by President Bill Clinton and retired in 2022, prompt in a press release that Mr. Fried was keen to vary his views due to his innate mental honesty.
“Charles loved ideas,” he stated. “He would try them out on his colleagues and friends, discarding some, developing others, and always listening to the thoughts of others.”
Mr. Fried’s tutorial pursuits included how ethical and political philosophy make clear authorized issues; he wrote a number of books on the subject, together with “An Anatomy of Values” (1970) and “Right and Wrong” (1978).
A longtime Republican who for 40 years suggested the Harvard chapter of the conservative Federalist Society, Mr. Fried was an particularly harsh critic of President Donald J. Trump’s disdain for courts and the regulation, and of the Justice Department beneath his second legal professional common, William P. Barr.
Mr. Fried and different Republican and conservative attorneys, members of a gaggle referred to as Checks & Balances, castigated Mr. Barr publicly for defending Mr. Trump’s makes an attempt to impede the investigation of Russian interference within the 2016 election and, in 2019, to stress Ukraine — which led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.
“The people who claim they’re conservatives today are demanding loyalty to this completely lawless, ignorant, foul-mouthed president,” Mr. Fried informed The Times in 2019. He disclosed in The Boston Globe in 2016 that he deliberate to vote for Hillary Clinton.
During Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, for inciting an rebel on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Fried joined different constitutional attorneys in a press release calling claims by Mr. Trump’s protection crew that his conduct was protected by the First Amendment “legally frivolous.”
Charles Fried was born Karel Fried in Prague on April 15, 1935, to Antonin and Marta (Winterstein)Fried. His father was a senior vice chairman at Skoda Works, a heavy equipment and arms producer. The household fled to England — “with Hitler as my travel agent,” as Mr. Fried as soon as put it — the place they lived for 2 years earlier than relocating to New York City in 1941. In the United States, his father had an import-export business, the place his mom labored as an assistant supervisor.
(When the Communist authorities in Prague collapsed in 1989 throughout the Velvet Revolution, Mr. Fried joined different Western attorneys in advising the Czech authorities on a brand new structure.)
After graduating from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, he earned a B.A. in fashionable languages and literature from Princeton in 1956. He studied regulation and philosophy on a Fulbright scholarship on the University of Oxford, then graduated from Columbia Law School in 1960.
He was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II and in 1961, at 26, joined the Harvard Law School school. Mr. Breyer was in his first-class, on prison regulation.
The Reagan administration recruited Mr. Fried when he was 50, partly on the power of problem papers he had written for the Reagan marketing campaign of 1980 about, amongst different issues, easy methods to voice opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment in a presidential debate.
Except for his years as solicitor common, from 1985 to 1989, and a stint as an affiliate justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1995 to 1999 (he was appointed by his former scholar, Governor Weld), Mr. Fried spent practically 60 years on the Harvard Law School school.
In 1993 whereas at Harvard, he argued a case earlier than the Supreme Court, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, which set requirements for professional scientific testimony in federal courts.
He is survived by his spouse, Anne Summerscale Fried, an artwork historical past scholar he married in 1959; a son, Gregory, a philosophy professor at Boston College; a daughter, Antonia Fried, a psychologist; and 5 grandchildren.
Mr. Fried introduced his retirement in December, although he stated he deliberate to proceed weighing in on the authorized and political problems with the day.
“What do I plan next?” he stated. “What I always do here, except for the classes. I write, I go to workshops, I read my colleagues’ work, I comment on it, and then I write my own work.”
That similar month, in a column in The Harvard Crimson, Mr. Fried defended the college’s president, Claudine Gay, after she got here beneath fireplace for her response to antisemitism on campus.
He continued to defend her after the assaults broadened to incorporate Dr. Gay’s scholarly document. He informed The Times that he discounted accusations of plagiarism towards Dr. Gay as a result of they have been a part of an “extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.”
Dr. Gay resigned in January after additional stress and accusations of plagiarism.
Source: www.nytimes.com