Aharon Barak, president of the Israeli Supreme Court, will deliver the keynote address at this year's commencement exercises, to be held May 18. The University will confer honorary degrees upon Barak and six others, including U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.Barak became president of the Supreme Court in 1995, after having previously been deputy president of the court, a justice on the court and Israel's attorney general before that. He holds a Ph.D. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and served as a lecturer at New York University School of Law from 1970 to 1972. He became a professor at Hebrew University in 1972 and in 1973 received the Kaplan Prize, an award given for excellence in science and research. He also received the Israel Prize in legal studies and is a member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences.

Pelosi, the U.S. House Democratic leader, is the first woman to hold the position and the highest ranked woman ever to serve in the U.S. Congress. She has served in the House for 15 years.

Degrees will also be conferred upon James O. Freedman, a former president of both Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa and a Brandeis trustee, Richard Holbrooke, former permanent U.S. representative to the United Nations and former U.S. ambassador to Germany, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a professor of sociology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, historian and author David McCullough and philanthropist Alan B. Slifka.

Freedman is the recipient of the Frederick W. Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Holbrooke was the chief negotiator of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that concluded the war in Bosnia. Lawrence-Lightfoot, who pioneered portraiture, an academic bridge between aesthetics and empiricism, was awarded the MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1984 and Harvard's George Ledlie prize for research in 1993, awarded to the person who contributes the "most valuable contribution to science" and "the benefit of mankind." McCullough has received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his work in the field of history.

Slifka, a Brandeis Fellow and prominent contributor, is a co-founder of the Abraham Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated to coexistence in Israel. He is also a Brandeis Fellow. With his mother, he endowed the Joseph Slifka Coexistence Endowment Fund, which brings Israeli-Arabs and Israeli-Jews to Brandeis for undergraduate study. The Alan B. Slifka Foundation provides support for the Program in International Coexistence by the same name.

Barak has often been cited as redefining Israeli democracy. In 1999 he wrote a decision in which the Supreme Court barred the use of physical methods of coercion in questioning suspected terrorists. He wrote in the decision, as quoted in The New York Times, "Although democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the rule of law and recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security.

The Israeli Supreme Court has often come under attack from Jewish religious authorities in Israel, due to its insistence on recognizing civil rights, even when they do not mesh with religious law. The court, under Barak's presidency, has decided to recognize non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism and civil marriages, for example. In 1998, the court forced years of negotiation between Orthodox and secular authorities over the issue of draft exemptions for Orthodox students of religion, after it ruled the exemption illegal.

According to New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman '75, a Brandeis trustee, Barak fears a division of Israeli society into religious and secular tribes, and he has therefore attempts to use the high court's decisions to create a basis for constitutional law in Israel.

Brandeis University's 52nd Commencement exercises will be held Sunday, May 18 in Gosman Sports and Convocation Center.