Two tenant groups and the Cambridge Democratic City Committee are vigorously protesting the expected nomination of Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried to the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), the state's highest judicial body. The tenant activists, and several attorney groups, will hold a rally at the State House at 10:30 a.m. today.

Despite the state legislature vote in January to gradually phase out rent restrictions in Cambridge, Boston and Brookline, tenants have not forgotten that Fried was an opponent of their cause celebre.

Fried, Carter professor of general jurisprudence at Harvard Law School, served as solicitor general in the Reagan administration from 1985 to 1989. A Cambridge resident, he was an active and vocal opponent of rent control.

Gov. William F. Weld '66 is reportedly hoping to nominate Fried to the SJC, following the departure of Justice Joseph R. Nolan, who must leave the court this year upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70.

A state judicial nominating council will provide five names to Weld, from which the governor will choose his nominee.

Fried said yesterday that speculation about his nomination is premature. "The nominating council has not even provided the five names," he said yesterday. "The whole thing is really pretty hypothetical."

Fried said he had agreed to submit his name as a possible nominee, but said Weld has Fried his intentions.

The nomination would require the approval of the Governor's Council, but not of the state legislature. The Democratic-controlled legislature would have little control over the appointment process.

Rent control supporters hope their protests will pressure Weld to nominate another candidate, saying Fried would be an unacceptable choice.

"Fried approached the whole question of rent control with what can only be described as ideological fervor," said Michael H. Turk, co-chair of the Cambridge Tenants Union, one of the groups opposing Fried. "This was someone who had an agenda, which essentially meant wiping out tenant protections, and he was essentially hell-bent on doing it."

The Democratic city committee also contends that Fried's right-wing arguments during his federal tenure make him unsuitable for a spot as a jurist on the nine-member SJC. The city Democrats voted last Monday to formally oppose Fried's nomination.

"Jurists on our Commonwealth's historic high bench uniformly possess the quality of fairness or at minimum the appearance of fairness or at minimum the appearance of fairness," the committee said in a written statement. "Fried fails to pass this basic test."

The statement also said that Fried opposed the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and it criticized Fried's positions on collective bargaining and social welfare.

`A Sore Thumb'

But critics are especially angered by Fried's legal assistance to real estate interests during one of the three court challenges to Question 9, the state referendum that abolished rent control.