Charles Fried

Rachel Brand ’98 is leading the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s campaign to roll back government regulations while also serving as a charter member of a government Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week on several major cases including United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry in regard to same-sex marriage, Fisher v. University of Texas on Affirmative Action, and Shelby County v. Holder, which concerned the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A number of HLS faculty shared their opinions of the rulings on the radio, television, on the web and in print.

In the May 21 edition of The New York Times’ ‘Room for Debate,’ Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried considers the question of whether the Obama administration’s actions against journalists in leak inquiries has protected national security or violated the First Amendment.

Ronald M. Dworkin LL.B. ’57, renowned legal scholar and philosopher, died on Feb. 13, 2013. In the days since, a number of Harvard Law School professors have written pieces about Dworkin, who was a towering figure in the legal world.

An article written by Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried was named an exemplar of good legal writing by The Green Bag, a quarterly journal devoted to readable, concise, and entertaining legal scholarship. A number of Harvard Law School alumni were also included on Green Bag’s 2012 list of “Exemplary Legal Writing.” Their work will appear in the “2013 Almanac & Reader.”

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried has written a major article analyzing the Supreme Court’s late-June decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The article, which is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and also in a volume to be published by Oxford, has been given a rare advance publication by SCOTUSblog, which posted it on August 2.

Last summer, Professor Robert Mnookin ’68, found himself wanting to know more about U.S.-Cuba relations. “I had an idea that there was a very interesting set of questions related to when, how and whether the two countries would ever negotiate a reconciliation,” he says. He decided to investigate by teaching a reading group—a small, 1-credit class, where 2Ls and 3Ls are able to dig deeply into a given topic in a way that provokes extended discussion among the group. “I am not an expert on Cuba; I’m an expert on negotiation, and what a reading group allowed me to do is learn with the students about an area I didn’t know much about,” he says.

The presidency is more powerful, larger, and has more tools at its disposal than ever before, said Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith. But, he quickly added, that’s only half the story. The other half of the story—the forces that constrain presidential power—was the main topic during a March19 panel discussion of his new book “Power and Constraint: The Accountability Presidency after 9/11,” hosted by the Harvard Book Store at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square.

The Supreme Court opened its review of the national health-care overhaul on Mar. 26, the first of three days of oral arguments on the 2010 law. In light of the historic arguments, law schools professors at HLS and elsewhere in the Boston area have incorporated the debate into their classrooms, and, In the media, HLS Professors I. Glenn Cohen. Einer Elhauge, Noah Feldman, Charles Fried and Laurence Tribe weighed in on the case.

HLS Professor Charles Fried was counsel of record in an amicus brief filed on Jan. 13 with the Supreme Court on behalf of 104 health law professors supporting the constitutionality of the insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which will be challenged before the Supreme Court in Department of Health and Human Services v. State of Florida in March.

In a recent op-ed for the Boston Globe, Professor Charles Fried, a life-long Republican, writes that before he can give Senator Scott Brown his support in the next election, Fried needs to know what kind of Republican Brown is. 

The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates passed a resolution on Tuesday, Aug. 9, urging Congress to amend and strengthen federal lobbying rules. HLS Professor Charles Fried co-chaired the bi-partisan ABA Administrative Law Section task force, which proposed the recommendations in its January 2011 report.

On August 1st, Scotus Blog published an op-ed by Beneficial Professor of Law Charles Fried on the constitutionality of the healthcare mandate. In the piece, Fried argues that the attack against President Obama’s Affordable Care Act is pure politics and ignores established legal principles.

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried and his son, Suffolk University Professor Gregory Fried, have been awarded the 2011 Bruce K. Gould Book Award for “Because it is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the age of Terror” (W.W. Norton &Company 2010).

In the Washington Post ‘Opinions’ section on May 5, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried and his son, Suffolk University Philosophy Department Chair Gregory Fried, discussed the killing of Osama bin Laden. The authors argued that torture apologists are undermining what the pair call a “great victory” for the U.S. by calling into question the circumstances under which bin Laden was felled during the firefight in his compound in Pakistan—a “risible” notion, by the authors’ standards.

Debating what Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow called “one of the most important public policy issues and one of the most important constitutional issues,” three law professors offered different perspectives on whether the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) violates the commerce clause of the Constitution and infringes on personal liberties.

In a New York Times op-ed about the challenge to Arizona’s public financing scheme currently pending in the Supreme Court, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried and co-author Cliff Sloan '84 write: “The [Arizona] law simply ensures that, when a candidate relying on private money speaks, the publicly financed candidate has the money to answer.” The op-ed—“Free Speech Worth Paying For”—appeared in the March 26, 2011 edition of The New York Times.

On February 22, HLS Beneficial Professor of Law Charles Fried joined more than 10 former elected officials in an amici curiae brief filed in support of the respondents in McComish v. Bennett, now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired a hearing on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and the provision that requires, beginning in 2014, every American to maintain health insurance coverage. The law requires all citizens without work-based insurance to purchase plans in the private market.

A bi-partisan ABA Administrative Law Section task force, co-chaired by HLS Professor Charles Fried, issued a report recommending significant changes to federal lobbying laws. The proposed changes would broaden disclosure required by those involved in lobbying campaigns, address fundraising participation by lobbyists and strengthen enforcement of current law.

Professor Charles Fried joined NPR's On Point to discuss Congress's unprecedented decision to read aloud the full text of the U.S. Constitution as the year's first order of business.