Charles Fried

Charles Fried

Beneficial Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Charles Fried

Professor Charles Fried (1935-2024) was a Faculty Associate of the Ethics Center since 1990. Read our tribute to Professor Fried here.

Educated at Princeton, Oxford and Columbia Law School, Charles Fried, the Beneficial Professor of Law, has been teaching at Harvard Law School since 1961, where he was the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence. He was Solicitor General of the United States from 1985-89, and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from1995-99. He returned to Harvard with his present title in 1999.

Professor Fried's scholarly and teaching interests have been moved by the connection between normative theory and the concrete institutions of public and private law. During his Harvard career he has taught Criminal Law, Commercial Law, Roman Law, Torts, Contracts, Labor Law, Constitutional Law and Federal Courts, Appellate and Supreme Court Advocacy. The author of many books and articles, his Anatomy of Values (1970), Right and Wrong (1978), and Modern Liberty (2006) develop themes in moral and political philosophy with applications to law. Contract as Promise (1980), Making Tort Law (2003, with David Rosenberg) and Saying What the Law Is: The Constitution in the Supreme Court (2004) are fundamental inquiries into broad legal institutions. Order & Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution (1991) discusses major themes developed in Professor Fried's time as Solicitor General. In recent years, he has taught Constitutional Law and Contracts, and as a teacher has argued a number of major cases in state and federal courts, most notably Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, in which the Supreme Court established the standards for the use of expert and scientific evidence in federal courts. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Law Institute.

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