He served as president of the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review and wrote his 1931 thesis on "The Effect of State Statutes on Federal Equity Jurisdiction."
His career there of teaching and scholarship was interrupted only by a return to the Solicitor General's office during World War II and a year as visiting professor at Cambridge University.
[3] Nevertheless, in 1962 President Kennedy twice considered naming Freund to the Supreme Court for positions ultimately filled by Deputy Attorney General Byron R. White and Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg.
Freund believed that the mission of law was "to impose a measure of order upon the disorder of experience without stifling diversity, spontaneity, and disarray.
"[5] Freund often cited Lord Acton's dictum, "When you perceive a truth, look for the balancing truth," writing that the great issues that come before the Supreme Court "reflect not so much a clash of right and wrong as a conflict between right and right: effective law enforcement and the integrity of the accused; public order and freedom of speech; freedom of worship and abstention from aiding as well as impeding religion.
"[7] In the 1970s, Freund delivered a lecture in Birmingham, Alabama on the opinions of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black in the field of religion in the schools.
In this paper, Freund said: "Reverence for what we know, humility in the presence of the unknown, awe in the face of the unknowable – these are the pervasive moods of the spirit that transcend religious differences and make of learning itself a spiritual experience.
A story of Willard Gibbs, the great Yale scientist, describes him standing before a blackboard on which he had worked out an abstruse equation, tears streaming down his cheeks, and the class staring at the board with the gaze of one who had just seen angels.
Ray Jenkins, a journalist who took his courses as a Nieman Fellow, said: "I never met anyone who studied under Paul Freund who did not speak of it as a spiritual experience.
During the 1970s, Freund lived in an 11th-floor apartment on the Charles River overlooking Harvard Stadium, where he regularly attended Crimson football games.
[2] He attended the monthly "Freund Dinners" arranged by fifteen Fly Club undergraduates at the Ritz, and delivered wisdom and friendship from his position at the big round table.