Charles Fried

Charles Fried, a conservative legal scholar who as President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general argued against abortion rights and affirmative action before the Supreme Court — but who later rejected the conservative legal movement’s rightward march, calling the current high court “reactionary” — died on Tuesday January 23 2024 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 88. His death was announced by Harvard Law School, where Mr. Fried taught many thousands of students beginning in 1961. In 1985, as solicitor general — the White House’s representative before the Supreme Court — Mr. Fried argued that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. But he later changed his mind. Although Mr. Fried testified in favor of the confirmation of John G. Roberts as chief justice in 2005, he became an outspoken critic of the Roberts court. Fried was an especially harsh critic of President Donald J. Trump. After graduating from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, he earned a B.A. in modern languages and literature from Princeton in 1956. He studied law and philosophy on a Fulbright scholarship at 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 faculty.Except for his years as solicitor general, from 1985 to 1989, and a stint as an associate justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial 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. He is survived by his wife, Anne Summerscale Fried, an art history scholar he married in 1959; a son, Gregory, a philosophy professor at Boston College; a daughter, Antonia Fried, a psychologist; and five grandchildren.