Charles Fried, a conservative legal scholar who as President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general argued against abortion rights and affirmative action before the Supreme Court — but who later rejected the conservative legal movement’s rightward march, calling the current high court “reactionary” — died on Jan. 23 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 88.

In 2021, as the high court’s Republican-appointed supermajority looked likely to reverse Roe, Mr. Fried wrote in an opinion column for The New York Times, “To overturn Roe now would be an act of constitutional vandalism.” His reasoning was that a 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, had more firmly established the right to abortion than when he opposed it for the Reagan White House.

He became an outspoken critic of the Roberts Court over its rulings limiting voting rights, labor unions, campaign finance reform, and its refusal to limit blatant partisan gerrymandering, believing in change that is incremental and not radical.

Mr. Fried spent nearly 60 years on the Harvard Law School faculty.

Alvin Moscow, who wrote a best-selling account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria in 1956, then collaborated on the memoirs of several public figures, including Richard M. Nixon soon after he lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, died on Feb. 6 in North Las Vegas. He was 98.

In all, 56 people died in the collision of the two ships. In Collision Course: The Andrea Doria and the Stockholm, Mr. Moscow described the dramatic last moments of the Italian ship.

Berish Strauch, a plastic surgeon whose pioneering procedures to reattach or replace vital body parts included one of the first toe-to-thumb transplants, died on Dec. 24 in Greenwich, CT. He was 90.

As the longtime chief of reconstructive surgery at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Strauch devised many of the surgical procedures and technologies that are now considered commonplace. After a New York City firefighter lost his thumb in 1976, Dr. Strauch tried to reattach it. When that proved impossible, he suggested something more radical: taking one of the man’s big toes and sewing it in place of the severed digit. Not only did the surgery work, but within a few months, the firefighter was back on the job.

Howard Golden, who as Brooklyn borough president for a quarter-century pressed to strengthen the borough economically, and defended it against slights real or perceived in the years before it experienced a gentrifying revival, died on Jan. 24 at his home in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. He was 98.

Mr. Golden’s career in politics developed as he moved up in Brooklyn’s Democratic party. He was a city councilman from Borough Park for seven years before being chosen to fill the borough president’s post temporarily when it became vacant on Jan. 3, 1977. He won election to his first full term later that year. His 25-year run ended on Dec. 31, 2001.

Mr. Golden remained a lifelong champion of Brooklyn, his pride in the borough unshakable. In a speech in 2000, he said, “There are two kinds of people in this world — those that come from Brooklyn, and those that wish they did.”

Arno A. Penzias, whose astronomical probes confirmed what became known as the Big Bang theory, died on Jan. 22 in San Francisco. He was 90.

Dr. Penzias shared the 1978 Novel Prize in physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery in 1964 of cosmic microwave background radiation, remnants of an explosion that gave birth to the universe some 14 billion years ago, now the accepted explanation for the origin of the universe.

Dr. Penzias was born in Munich in 1932. In 1939, he and his brother, Gunter, were put on a train as part of the Kindertransport, the British rescue effort that brought some 10,000 children to England. The family reunited in New York in 1940.

Dr. Penzias’s path to stumbling onto the answer to one of humanity’s most central questions started when he joined Bell Laboratories as a member of its radio research group in Holmdel. There he saw the potential of AT&T’s new satellite communications antenna, a giant radio telescope known as the Holmdel Horn, as a tool for cosmological observation.

Lawrence L. Langer, a literary scholar who found the Holocaust an event so vast and evil that it defies moral framing, died on Jan. 29 at his home in Wellesley, MA. He was 94.

Across some 15 books and monographs, Dr. Langer insisted on an interpretation of the Holocaust as a moral black hole. Reason, Humanism and Enlightenment values had no function in the concentration camps, he said.

At Simmons College, he created what is believed to be the country’s first academic course on literature and the Holocaust. He also set to work on his first book, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, which was a finalist for the 1976 National Book Award, and is today considered a founding text in the field of Holocaust studies.