As Kathryn Lopez and Jay Nordlinger have noticed over at The Corner, former Reagan solicitor general and Massachusetts high court justice Charles Fried has come out for Barack Obama. Having reviewed his terrible book Saying What the Law Is for NR’s May 17, 2004 issue (not online, alas), I am not a bit surprised. Relying uncritically on misplaced “doctrines” of the Supreme Court, for instance, Fried pronounced that flag burning and pornography are protected forms of “expression” under the First Amendment. And, writing three decades after Roe v. Wade and a year after Lawrence v. Texas, he told us in this hopeless muddle of a book that “so far the Court has not gone too far in its protection of liberty under the Due Process Clause. Perhaps it has not gone far enough.” As I asked in my review of the book, So how much judicial legislation is enough?

Charles Fried is now too old to be on any president’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Thank goodness. But with a paper trail like this, we would have no excuse not to expect another David Souter in the prospect of Justice Charles Fried.