Paul Abraham Freund (February 16, 1908February 5, 1992) was an American legal scholar. He taught most of his life at Harvard Law School and is known for his writings on the United States Constitution and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Early life, education, and family
Freund was born in St. Louis, Missouri to parents of German-Jewish descent. He was a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis (1928) and Harvard Law School (1931, 1932). He served as president of the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review and wrote his 1931 thesis on "The Effect of State Statutes on Federal Equity Jurisdiction."
Career
In 1932-1933, Freund served as law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Louis Brandeis. He later called this "the most important year in my life. Brandeis set superhuman standards and lived as if each day were his last on earth and every minute counted. He was a moralist. He saw moral issues where others saw expediency."
Freund next served at the United States Treasury, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the Office of the Solicitor General, where he worked on Supreme Court briefs for major New Deal constitutional cases, arguing for a relatively flexible interpretation of the Constitution in economic and social matters.
He joined the faculty of Harvard Law School as lecturer in 1939 and was named professor of law in 1940. His career there of teaching and scholarship was interrupted only by a return to the Solicitor General's office during World War II and a year as visiting professor at Cambridge University. He was named Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor in 1950, Royall Professor of Law in 1957, and Carl M. Loeb University Professor in 1958. Freund retired from Harvard Law School in 1976.
He was named by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the position of editor-in-chief of a projected multi-volume history of the Supreme Court and therefore declined an offer from President-elect John F. Kennedy to become Solicitor General of the United States that many believed would have led to his eventual appointment to the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, in 1962 President Kennedy twice considered naming Freund to the Supreme Court for positions ultimately filled by Deputy Attorney General Byron R. White and Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg. The Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy opposed Freund on the basis that he did not like the symbolism of another Harvard faculty member in office, following the appointments of Archibald Cox, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to serve in the Kennedy administration. Freund was also opposed by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Writings
Most of Freund's writings were the result of invitations to speak. They have been collected, principally, in three volumes: On Understanding the Supreme Court (1949), The Supreme Court of the United States: Its Business, Purposes and Performance (1961), and On Law and Justice (1968).
Philosophy
Freund believed that the mission of law was "to impose a measure of order upon the disorder of experience without stifling diversity, spontaneity, and disarray."
Freund often cited Lord Acton's dictum, "When you perceive a truth, look for the balancing truth," writing that the great issues that come before the Supreme Court "reflect not so much a clash of right and wrong as a conflict between right and right: effective law enforcement and the integrity of the accused; public order and freedom of speech; freedom of worship and abstention from aiding as well as impeding religion. "The courts," he wrote, "are the substations that transform the high-tension charge of the philosophers into the reduced voltage of a serviceable current."
In the 1970s, Freund delivered a lecture in Birmingham, Alabama on the opinions of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black in the field of religion in the schools. In this paper, Freund said: "Reverence for what we know, humility in the presence of the unknown, awe in the face of the unknowable – these are the pervasive moods of the spirit that transcend religious differences and make of learning itself a spiritual experience. A story of Willard Gibbs, the great Yale scientist, describes him standing before a blackboard on which he had worked out an abstruse equation, tears streaming down his cheeks, and the class staring at the board with the gaze of one who had just seen angels. No court or Constitution stands in the way of that kind of moral and spiritual experience. All that stands in the way is our indifference or inadequacy to meet the challenge."
Influence
When he died, former Harvard Law School Dean James Vorenberg called Freund "the dominant figure of his time in the field of constitutional law."