Jesse M. Fried
William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law
Harvard Law School
Jesse M. Fried is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a fellow and research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute.
His research focuses on executive compensation, corporate governance, corporate bankruptcy, venture capital, and corporate law. He is the co-author, with Lucian Bebchuk, of “Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation,” which has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Italian, and Japanese.
Before assuming the William Nelson Cromwell Professorship, Fried served as the Dane Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Earlier, he was a professor of law and faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Before entering academia, he practiced as a tax attorney at Sullivan & Worcester. He has also held visiting appointments at City University of Hong Kong, Columbia University, the Duisenberg School of Finance, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Singapore Management University, Tel Aviv University, and Reichman University.
Fried was ranked the 19th most-cited legal scholar across all fields by the Social Science Research Network in 2023.
He earned a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, an A.M. in economics from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and a bachelor’s in economics from Harvard College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
