Charles Alan Wright (September 3, 1927 – July 7, 2000) was an American constitutional lawyer widely considered to be the foremost authority in the United States on constitutional law and federal procedure, and was the coauthor of the 54-volume treatise, Federal Practice and Procedure with Arthur R. Miller and Kenneth W. Graham, Jr., among others.

Afterward, he spent a year as law clerk for Judge Charles Edward Clark of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Professor Wright was a popular, if somewhat eccentric, educator, conducting class without lecture notes or even a copy of the casebook.

He had a photographic memory of the materials and would often answer student questions with a correct citation, by specific page, of a case different from the one the class was studying.

[2] Wright represented President Richard Nixon on constitutional issues before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities during its 1973 investigation into the break-in the previous year at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement in the burglary.

In this capacity, in federal district court, he argued unsuccessfully that the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches protected the president from having to turn over White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox.