Margaret H. Marshall, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, will be the commencement speaker at Colby College in Maine on May 21, President William R. Cotter announced. Marshall is the first woman to serve in that capacity. Prior to her appointment to the bench she was the first woman vice president and general counsel of Harvard University and was a member of the President’s Academic Council.

A native of South Africa, Marshall graduated from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, where in 1966 she was elected president of the 20,000-member anti-apartheid National Union of South Africa Students. She earned a master’s degree in education at Harvard in 1969 and a J.D. degree from Yale in 1976. She served as a consultant to organizations and foundations concerned with ending apartheid and worked for the United Nations. A United States citizen since 1978, she became a partner at the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart.

A past president of the Boston Bar Association, she is a member of the American Bar Association, was the first woman Massachusetts State Chair of the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation and is a member of the Council of the American Law Institute. She served on committees for gender equality for the Supreme Judicial Court and the U.S. First Circuit Court, on the Judicial Nominating Council for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and on the Committee on Federal Appointments in Massachusetts. She has been a regular guest litigator on the PBS television series The Advocates. She has received the American Bar Association’s Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, the American Jewish Congress’s Louis D. Brandeis Award and the first Harvard College Women’s Professional Achievement Award.

At commencement honorary degrees will be presented to Marshall, outgoing Colby president William R. Cotter and his wife Linda K. Cotter, African-American art authority David C. Driskell and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder.