Charles Fried

As Harvard Law School moves to break from the University’s central approach to handling cases of alleged sexual harassment, Law professors are questioning the relationship between their school and Harvard’s central administration and faculty governance structures more broadly. Two Law School professors, Charles Fried and Robert H. Mnookin, penned an op-ed last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing the “cadre of administrators” at Harvard and called for the creation of a faculty senate as a mechanism to ensure faculty participation in major University decisions...In an interview this week, Mnookin said he had been thinking about University centralization issues over the past couple of years, but “it’s certain the importance of it was underscored by the process by which both the decisions on Title IX and with regard to our health policies were adapted.”

University President Drew G. Faust is defending Harvard’s governance structure after two Harvard Law School professors were sharply critical of the central administration in an op-ed that called for the formation of a faculty senate...Faust was responding directly to an op-ed published last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Law School professors Charles Fried and Robert H. Mnookin, who argued that Harvard’s central administration and “bureaucracy” had grown extensively. “And the results have not always been good,” it read. The authors also suggested that observers should not assume that the FAS, whose monthly meetings are chaired by Faust, speaks for the whole University. Fried and Mnookin pointed in particular to the unveiling of Harvard’s University-wide sexual assault policy and procedures last July and the new health benefits plans for non-union employees last fall as examples of decisions that they argued did not involve enough faculty input. But Faust took issue with each of those examples, maintaining that broad input from across Harvard was sought.

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz loved to argue as a Harvard student and boasted he'd get the best grades in his class, only to lose out to two other classmates. In a series of exclusive interviews with Metro, several of his former classmates painted a complex portrait of the Tea Party's most beloved presidential candidate. Laurence Tribe, a longtime Harvard law professor, said Cruz took his constitutional law class, challenged his teacher in interesting and "invariably right-leaning" ways at every turn...Renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz recalled Cruz was "not a very smiley guy," and he thought would become an "extraordinarily able appellate lawyer."...Another longtime Harvard law professor Charles Fried said he worked with Cruz when the latter was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. "I have a vivid recollection of a very smart, very disciplined man," he said. "I've been reading all these sharp elbow stories but I didn't see that. He was, I would say, correct. Respectful and correct."

An op-ed by Charles Fried and Robert H. Mnookin. Today Harvard faces a serious governance problem that requires institutional change. When we first came here, the university was organized on the constitutional principle: “Each tub on its own bottom.” This meant first of all that each of the component schools (arts and sciences, medical school, law school, and so on) had not only a high degree of budgetary independence but also that its faculty and dean had a large measure of autonomy. And at the level of the schools such administrators as there were worked under the direction of the dean and in close cooperation with faculty committees. Correspondingly, the central administration was very small: There were four vice presidents to oversee administration, alumni affairs and development, finance, and government relations, and a general counsel...The time has come for Harvard to institute, as other universities have done, a representative faculty senate that would include ladder-rank faculty from all schools in the university.

...January also saw the launch of a Massive Open Online Course (Mooc) on contract law from Harvard Law School. Students will get a taste of this foundational part of the law school curriculum at one of the country’s top institutions. The programme is intended for a general audience rather than part of studies for a law degree, and will “give people a sense of how the law works, and what kind of thing the law is”, according to Charles Fried, a Harvard professor and the course’s instructor. According to Professor Fried, it has already proven immensely popular. Students registered for the course number “well over 15,000 people, and they’re in all sorts of places, including two in Papua New Guinea.”

A Justice Department report highlighting rampant bias in the Ferguson, Mo., police department and court system is likely to bring sweeping change to the city but may not help many of those affected sue for damages. ... Nevertheless, someone who was ticketed, or who just felt harassed, for being singled out for jaywalking or any other misdemeanor will find it difficult to prove widespread racial base was the cause. “A report that says [police] routinely do this sort of thing doesn’t quite cut it,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School. Even with all the statistics showing systemic bias, it proves little on a case-by-case basis. “A report like this is in an odd way irrelevant,” to individual civil cases, he said.

In the first Affordable Care Act case three years ago, the Supreme Court had to decide whether Congress had the power, under the Commerce Clause or some other source of authority, to require individuals to buy health insurance. It was a question that went directly to the structure of American government and the allocation of power within the federal system...These examples all come from a brief filed on the government’s behalf by a group of law professors who are specialists in statutory interpretation, administrative law or constitutional law. One is Charles Fried, a law professor at Harvard who served as solicitor general during the second Reagan administration.

While U.S. Supreme Court opinions are routinely examined through the political lens of the court’s nine justices, far less is known about the ideological makeup of the thousands of judges on the nation’s federal and state benches...Now, research from Maya Sen, an assistant professor of public policy with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), and Adam Bonica, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, sheds some light on the opaque world of politics in the judiciary...[Nancy] Gertner said the research “comports” with her view that Republican presidents such George W. Bush selected conservative judges, but Democratic presidents, including Clinton and Barack Obama, J.D. ’91, largely pulled their punches in an effort to sidestep contentious confirmation processes...Charles Fried, the Beneficial Professor of Law at HLS, said the research documents what is already known: that politics has always played a decisive role in judicial appointments.

Following a Supreme Court decision last Friday to hear arguments on the issue of same-sex marriage, several Harvard Law School professors predict that the Court will grant a historic constitutional right to same-sex marriage nationwide, but they say a more moderate outcome remains a possibility...“I would guess that the best reading of the tea leaves is that there will be five votes upholding a right to gay marriage,” Richard H. Fallon, a Law School professor, said. He along with Charles Fried and Michael J. Klarman, also Law School professors, identified Justice Anthony Kennedy as the potential “swing vote.”...Law School professor and former Supreme Court clerk Laurence H. Tribe ’62 echoed the prediction in an email, writing that the he thinks the Court will “hold that the U.S. Constitution requires universal marriage equality.”...Mark V. Tushnet ’67, a Law School professor and former Supreme Court clerk, said that the addition of the second question allows the Court to “deal with the issue comprehensively, no matter the which way the first question came out.”

A letter by Charles Fried. It would help if we called things by their true names. The car dealers who put false income data into loan applications for people living on Social Security, surreptitiously add on unexplained charges, and sometimes even forge signatures are thieves. The banks that — knowingly or with willed ignorance — buy and package these loans are receivers of stolen property. The investors who buy these packages for their high rates of return are like customers who shop for bargains from fences or the tailgates of trucks selling hijacked goods. The free market is great, but it depends on honesty. Why aren’t more of these people being prosecuted?

The nation greets the coming of July each year with fireworks on the National Mall and, days earlier, explosive decisions at the U.S. Supreme Court…The theme of what one wag called "faux-nanimity" repeated itself again and again. "It represents a success in herding cats, but there is deep division underneath," observes Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe…"Precedent is getting a very hard knock all over the place," says Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general in the Reagan administration.

An op-ed by Charles Fried. Taking a page from former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman's book, "The Lost Lawyer," at Harvard as at many other law schools we try to teach our students that being a good lawyer is not just thinking of clever legal arguments to beat our clients' adversaries but offering our clients persuasive, wise counsel. There has been sad evidence lately that this lesson may not be getting across. Among those belatedly fired by General Motors Corp. in the faulty-ignition-switch fiasco were whole teams of lawyers who advised that cases be closed with confidential settlements and apparently did not persuasively urge prompt admissions and safety recalls.

The Supreme Court, offering a sweeping endorsement of Americans’ right to digital privacy, unanimously declared Wednesday that police must obtain a warrant before searching a suspect’s cellphone….“This is a very clear ruling about cellphone searches incident to an arrest. I would not extrapolate from it,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor who served as solicitor general under President Reagan. Fried pointed to a separate concurring opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who invites Congress to weigh in and enact legislation that draws “reasonable distinctions based on categories of information.” “Alito generally has been rather skeptical about honoring the concerns of the privacy Taliban,” Fried said.

A week after President Obama's 2012 reelection, the conservative Federalist Society gathered 1,500 lawyers in black tie to hear one of their own, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., vow to hold the line against an ever-expanding federal government that "towers over people."…Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, who served as U.S. solicitor general under President Reagan, gives Alito mixed grades, saying he has been careful and thoughtful, but also too driven by ideology..."The quality of his work is excellent. He is not a wiseguy. He's doesn't demean those who disagree with him. And you don't get pompous sloganeering from him," Fried said. "But I'm sorry that on the agenda items, he's been quite predictable. There's a real sense of an agenda with this court, and he's been part of that."

An influential US senator from Kentucky has threatened to derail President Obama’s nomination of a Harvard Law School professor to fill a rare vacancy on the federal Appeals Court in Boston, the court that helps establish the region’s legal climate. US Senator Rand Paul said in a letter to Senate leadership that he will block the confirmation of David Barron to a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit until the White House releases controversial memos Barron drafted that justified the US military’s unchecked killing of American citizens overseas…Barron is married to former Boston Globe editorial columnist Juliette Kayyem, a Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts. His nomination was supported by lifelong Republican John F. Manning, a colleague at Harvard Law, and Charles Fried, also a Harvard professor and solicitor general to President Reagan.