Barbara Fried
American lawyer and academic, mother of Sam Bankman-Fried
Barbara Helen Fried (; born 1951) is an American lawyer and professor emerita at Stanford Law School. Fried and Joseph Bankman are the parents of FTX and Alameda Research co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, convicted on seven counts of criminal fraud as CEO of the now-defunct and bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, alongside other company insiders.
Education
She graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. degree magna cum laude in English and American literature in 1977 and an M.A. degree in literature in 1980, as well as a J.D. degree magna cum laude in 1983 from Harvard Law School. Fried served from 1983 to 1984 as a judicial law clerk for Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Career
Fried joined the Stanford Law School Faculty as a tenure-track professor in 1987 after working as an associate attorney at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison from 1984 to 1987. She has investigated such topics as contractualism, libertarianism, and utilitarianism, and is considered an expert on legal ethics. Fried has written about effective altruism and moral philosopher Peter Singer. She has offered critiques on philosopher Robert Nozick's theory of property and psychologist John Money's work on "fetally androgenized girls." Her academic work centers on a branch of ethics known as consequentialism, the view that whether an action is right or wrong is determined by its consequences.
Fried is an affiliate of the Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality.
Fried retired from teaching in late 2022, which she said was a "long-planned" decision.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Barbara Fried” is american lawyer and academic, mother of Sam Bankman-Fried. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Barbara, Fried and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “american lawyer and academic, mother of Sam Bankman-Fried” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29930881. VIAF identifies the subject as 93683561. The Library of Congress control number is n79011353. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1977, 1980 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbara Fried” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.