Today, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify in support of chief justice nominee John Roberts, a member of the class of ’79, regarding Roberts’ qualifications for the position. In his service as the chair of the practitioners’ reading committee, Fried examined Roberts’ previous decisions to evaluate Roberts for the Standing Committee on the Judiciary of the American Bar Association.
“My strongest impression of Judge Roberts is that he is a superb lawyer, perhaps one of the finest of his generation,” Fried states in his testimony. “No one has raised any objection to John Roberts’s ability, learning, experience or integrity, but debate has arisen about his “judicial philosophy”—that is, his theory of judging, of the Constitution, of individual rights, of federalism.”
Fried is no stranger to the Supreme Court. In his service as solicitor general, he represented the Reagan administration in 25 cases before the Court. He also experienced his own judicial confirmation in 1995 when he became an associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
A complete version of Fried’s testimony before the committee is now available online.