Harvard Crimson
Updated: Tuesday, January 23 at 11:34 p.m.
Charles Fried, a longtime Harvard Law School professor and renowned conservative legal scholar who served as a U.S. solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, died on Tuesday, according to statements from his family and HLS Dean John F. Manning. He was 88.
A cause of death was not immediately available.
Fried joined HLS as a professor in 1961, where he taught for more than 60 years. He announced in December that he would retire at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year.
Fried also served as an associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 1995 to 1999 while lecturing on constitutional law at Harvard. He was known for serving as a faculty adviser to the Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society.
Manning announced Fried’s death in an email to HLS affiliates Tuesday evening, praising Fried for his “unfailing kindness, generosity, brilliance, wisdom, warmth, and wit.”
“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,” Manning wrote.
Fried authored numerous books and articles throughout his career and taught on a slew of subjects ranging from constitutional law to contracts.
Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe described Fried as “one of a kind: a towering intellect, erudite beyond belief, invariably kind, and unfailingly decent” in an emailed statement to The Crimson Tuesday evening.
“He enlivened every meeting and conversation, was a deeply philosophical lawyer and a great legal philosopher,” Tribe wrote.
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https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/24/charles-fried-dies-88/
