Yale Law School Professor Emeritus Daniel Freed, a pioneer in the criminal justice process, died Sunday at 82. Freed was a specialist in sentencing and criminal justice adminstration. “Dan Freed was a unique scholar, reformer, and social activist,” said Yale Law School Dean Robert Post. “He had an unmatched capacity to bring together people on all sides of controversial issues to create thoughtful, reflective, productive and collaborative working groups. He spent a lifetime seeking to realize his goal of making the criminal justice system fairer and more effective.”
Freed was one of the nation’s first professors to conduct workshops and seminars on criminal sentencing. In 1989, he co-founded the Federal Sentencing Reporter, a law review involving scholars, judges, practitioners, and policymakers. Yale Law Prof. Kate Stith said Freed “was one of the early theorists and proponents of sentencing guidelines, now commonplace, though he sought guidelines that left considerable room for individualized sentencing.” Among Freed’s books were The Nonsystem of Criminal Justice (1969) and Bail in the United States, co-authored in 1964 with Patricia Wald, seen as the basis for the Bail Reform Act of 1966.