Margaret Hilary Marshall's appointment to Massachusetts' highest court caps the 20-year legal career of a South African native who came to the United States in search of political freedom and moved quickly through the ranks of corporate law with a reputation as a brilliant litigator.

Marshall, Harvard's top lawyer since October 1992, is well-respected in Boston's legal community. She has worn many hats: anti-apartheid student activist, Boston Bar Association president and partner at Choate, Hall & Stewart, one of Boston's top firms, specializing in copyright and intellectual-property law.

Rudenstine named Marshall vice president and general counsel in 1992, as the new president filled the ranks of Harvard's top brass with his own appointees. She replaced the affable and energetic Daniel Steiner '54, who had occupied the post since 1971.

At the time of her appointment, Marshall was only the second woman to serve as a Harvard vice president.

Unlike Steiner, Marshall's work has taken place almost entirely behind the scenes and she has had minimal contact with students. She was instrumental in shaping Harvard's stances on sharing financial-aid information with Ivy League schools and on affirmative action.

But as Harvard's top litigator, directing a team of 11 full-time attorneys and responsible for the Harvard Police Department, Mar- shall was also the point person in several controversial affairs: complaints of racial incidents in the Police Department's guard unit, accusations of racial and gender bias in hiring at Harvard Law School, student concerns over the fairness of the University's disciplinary structure, even the decision to rescind Harvard's admission offer to matricide perpetrator Gina Grant in 1995.

Marshall's low profile and her reluctance to speak with campus publications may have contributed to the perception of University officials as unresponsive to bias complaints--despite Marshall's reputation as an advocate for civil rights and racial equality.

Like Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence Emeritus Charles Fried--the first appointment of Gov. William F. Weld '66 to the Supreme Judicial Court--Marshall is an immigrant. (Fried's family fled the Nazi regime in Czechoslovakia at the start of World War II.)

Marshall, 52, was born to a middle-class South African family in a small rural town called Newcastle in Natal; the only blacks she knew were servants, she said in a 1991 interview.

She graduated from the University of Witwatersand in Johannesburg in 1966. For the next two years, she served as president of the 20,000-member National Union of South African Students--described as "a red cancer which should be cut out" by South Africa's premier at the time.

At one point, Marshall chauffeured visitors' vans to a prison holding black activists on the outskirts of Cape Town. She also invited Robert F. Kennedy '48 to South Africa to speak to student groups.

Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was banned at that time, and the students' union was the only legal multiracial national group in the country.

After arriving in the United States in 1968, Marshall's criticism of the racial inequities and repressive police brutality of apartheid South Africa grew increasingly vocal, making a return to her homeland impossible.

"At that time, advocating sanctions against South Africa was a treasonable offense, and so I was not able to return to South Africa because of my activities in the United States," Marshall said at a news conference Tuesday, when Weld announced her nomination.

Marshall enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she earned a master's degree in 1969. She remained a doctoral candidate at the school until 1973, when she left Harvard for Yale Law School. She spent the 1975-76 school year at Harvard Law School, and received her degree from Yale in 1976. She joined the Massachusetts bar--and became a U.S. citizen--in 1977.

Marshall embarked on a successful career in civil litigation, serving as an associate and partner at Csaplar & Bok from 1976 to 1989, and then as a partner at Choate, Hall & Stewart from 1989 to 1992. She is considered a top expert in copyright and intellectual-property law.

In 1988 Marshall initiated a gender-bias study with two other lawyers, which found that women lawyers, are paid less and receive less respect than their male counterparts. The influential study prompted the SJC to form its own gender-bias investigating unit the following year.

Marshall served as president of the 8,000-member Boston Bar Association from 1991 to 1992, as the group's second woman chief. She pushed for greater access to the courts for poor and middle-class citizens; and in 1992, she helped draft a BBA legislative package that would have transferred appointment and budgeting power from the state legislature to the state's chief justices. That plan was ultimately derailed on Beacon Hill.

Marshall sits on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

The nomination to the state's top bench didn't come as a surprise: Marshall's name had been tossed around ever since Chief Justice Paul J. Liacos announced his retirement in June.

Still, when Marshall called President Neil L. Rudenstine Tuesday morning to inform him of the nomination, "it's really with sweet sadness that I told him," she said in an interview.

Rudenstine described Marshall's work as "totally superb."

"She's just been extraordinary from every point of view, a wonderful person and an exceptional mind, a person who understands the institution, knows the law but also knows the limits of the law," he said.

At Harvard, Marshall helped draft the University's policies regarding the sharing of student financial-aid information with other schools, in the wake of a 1989 Justice Department ruling that such sharing among the Ivy League universities amounted to anti-competitive price fixing.

Marshall also developed briefs the University planned to file in the Hopwood suit against the University of Texas challenging affirmative-action in higher education. Ultimately, the case never reached the Supreme Court, but Marshall's research will be used "when the next one comes," Rudenstine said.

But as Harvard's head litigator, Marshall's biggest defeat was handed to her in September 1993, when Harvard Law School settled a sex-discrimination case with former Assistant Professor of Law Clare Dalton.

The Law School conceded no fault, while agreeing to pay $260,000 to fund an institute for the study of domestic violence. Still, Dalton--a proponent of the Critical Legal Studies movement in law who had been denied tenure in 1987--called the settlement "a vindication" of her claims and got a one-time cash award of $80,000 to head the institute.

And earlier, in August 1993, the University came under fire after the release of a report that said allegations of racial and gender discrimination in the Police Department's security-guard unit were "unfounded." The report--which was authored by two University lawyers and a former colleague of Marshall's at Choate, Hall & Stewart--did identify "management weaknesses" in training and communication, but it was roundly criticized by the guards, who disagreed with its findings.

Rudenstine defended Marshall's handling of the report. "It was a situation that was looked at well and handled well," he said.

Others are less charitable. "Everybody knew that there were serious problems of racism in the Harvard University Police Department, but I think that Margaret Marshall played down those problems in the interests of administrative harmony," said Harvey A. Silverglate, a Boston lawyer who has represented two Harvard students in legal actions against the University.

Marshall shied away from a public role, rarely talking to the campus media or directly with students.

"I think that visibility is somewhat in the eyes of the beholder, quite honestly," Rudenstine said. "If you were going to go around the Faculty and ask if they knew her, she is as well known as any person."

However, the president admitted that "there aren't many occasions when she's asked to talk to students" and that he could not recall an incident when Marshall had met with students.

Still, some of Marshall's fans believe her interests in human rights and public access to the courts will naturally come to the fore in her new role as a jurist--instincts which may have come under pressure in her capacity as Harvard's lawyer.

"She's a person with a long history of human-rights work," said Ernest Winsor, a staff attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute who has known Marshall since the 1970s. "Then she went to Harvard and was sort of out of the loop with the political-advocacy legal scene. Now she goes into it with a very important position."

And others say Marshall, a Cambridge resident, can be charming in person. Weld praised her culinary bravery: Once, the governor recalled, he and Julia Child were guests at Marshall's home, and Marshall served lamb chops.

"Anybody who will set a cooked meal in front of Julia Child shows considerable courage," Weld joked.

Marshall is married to New York Times columnist and former Crimson executive J. Anthony Lewis '48; the couple has no children. Marshall's mother, Hilary, also lives in Cambridge. Her sister, Bridget de Bruyn, is a financial consultant in Dallas, and her brother, Hugh Marshall, is a conservationist in South Africa and Zimbabwe.CrimsonSewell ChanMARGARET H. MARSHALL is congratulated by Gov. WILLIAM F. WELD '66 at the State House in Boston last week.