Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Fried became a United States citizen in 1948. After studying at the Lawrenceville School and receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University in 1956, he attended Oxford University, where he earned a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Law in 1958 and 1960, respectively, and was awarded the Ordronnaux Prize in Law (1958). In 1960, Fried received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Columbia Law School, where he was a Stone Scholar. Subsequently he served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II.

Fried is admitted to the bars of the United States Supreme Court, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and numerous U.S. courts of appeals. He argued 25 cases in front of the Supreme Court while in the Solicitor General's office. He has served as counsel to a number of major law firms and clients, and in that capacity argued several major cases, perhaps the most important being Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceutical Co., both in the Supreme Court and in the Ninth Circuit on remand.

Fried's government service includes a year as Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States (1984-85) and a consulting relationship to that office (1983), as well as advisory roles with the Department of Transportation (1981-83) and President Ronald Reagan (1982). In October 1985, President Reagan appointed Fried as Solicitor General of the United States. Fried had previously served as Deputy Solicitor General and Acting Solicitor General. As Solicitor General, he represented the Reagan Administration before the Supreme Court in 25 cases. In 1989, when Reagan left office, Fried returned to Harvard Law School.

From September 1995 until June 1999, Fried served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, while teaching constitutional law at Harvard Law School as a Distinguished Lecturer. Prior to joining the court, Fried held the chair of Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School. On July 1, 1999, he returned to Harvard Law School as a fulltime member of the faculty and Beneficial Professor of Law. He has served on the Harvard Law School faculty since 1961, teaching courses on appellate advocacy, commercial law, constitutional law, contracts, criminal law, federal courts, labor law, torts, legal philosophy, and medical ethics.

Fried has published extensively. He is the author of seven books and over 30 journal articles, and his work has appeared in over a dozen collections. Unusually for a law professor without a graduate degree in philosophy, he has published significant work in moral and political theory only indirectly related to the law; Right and Wrong, for instance is an impressive general statement of a Kantian position in ethics with affinities with the work of Thomas Nagel, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick. Fried has been Orgain Lecturer at the University of Texas (1982), Tanner Lecturer on Human Values at Stanford University (1981), and Harris Lecturer on Medical Ethics at the Harvard Medical School (1974-75). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971-72. Fried is a member of the National Academy of Sciences's Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Law Institute.

In September 2005, Fried testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of the nomination of John Roberts to become Chief Justice of the United States. After the nomination of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court, Fried praised Alito as an outstanding judge but dismissed claims that Alito is radical, saying, "He is conservative, yes, but he is not radically conservative like Scalia." Fried testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and wrote a New York Times op-ed in support of Alito, who had served under him in the Solicitor General's office.

On October 24, 2008, despite his previous support for the presidential aspirations of Senator John McCain, Fried announced that he had voted for Senator Barack Obama for President by absentee ballot. Fried cited Senator McCain's selection of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate as the principal reason for his decision to vote for Senator Obama. As president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, Obama had published an article Fried wrote criticizing the effects of race-based affirmative action. Fried later told The Wall Street Journal:

"I admire Senator McCain and was glad to help in his campaign, and to be listed as doing so; but when I concluded that I must vote for Obama for the reason stated in my letter, I felt it wrong to appear to be recommending to others a vote that I was not prepared to cast myself. So it was more of an erasure than a public affirmation ... although obviously my vote meant that I thought that Obama was preferable to McCain-Palin. I do not consider abstention a proper option."

Fried is an adviser to the Harvard chapter of the Federalist Society.

• "There was the abortion brief and also the brief in the Wygant case. I had a big hand in writing it, and so did Sam Alito, who had this marvelous phrase saying that a particular African American baseball player would not have served as a great role model if the fences had been pulled in every time he was up at bat, a point which some people were greatly offended by because they thought it to be pamphleteering. I thought it was entirely appropriate." -Charles Fried (Solicitor General 1985 to 1989) in 2003.

• "What you're basically saying is that pussycats can't make contracts with 800 pound gorillas. And that's just not the law." -Charles Fried (Solicitor General 1985 to 1989) in 2008.

• "That's a very good answer. On Mars." -Charles Fried (Solicitor General 1985 to 1989) in 2008.

• "Believe me, I've sued them! Err... no... wait. I defended them. That was something else. But here we go! We're moving along! We're learning something." -Charles Fried (Solicitor General 1985 to 1989) in 2010.

• "The law is an ass." -Charles Fried (Solicitor General 1985 to 1989) in 2010.

• "Do not call a policeman a motherf***er, no matter what you've learned in this course." -Charles Fried (Solicitor General 1985 to 1989) in a 2010 course on First Amendment Law."

• Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror, by Charles Fried and Gregory Fried (2010 W.W. Norton)
• Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government (2006) (Trad. esp.: La libertad moderna y los límites del gobierno, Buenos Aires/Madrid, Katz editores S.A, 2009, ISBN 9788496859609)

• Saying What the Law Is: The Constitution in the Supreme Court (2004)

• Making Tort Law: What Should Be Done and Who Should Do It (with David Rosenberg) (2003)

• Order and Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution - A Firsthand Account (1991)

• Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation (1981)

• Right and Wrong (1978)

• Medical Experimentation: Personal Integrity and Social Policy (1974)

• An Anatomy of Values: Problems of Personal and Social Choice (1970)