WASHINGTON - Georgetown University law professor Martin D. Ginsburg, the husband of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died Sunday of cancer, the Supreme Court announced. He was 78.
Though he was among the nation's foremost experts on the federal tax code, Ginsburg relished his role as the outgoing half of one of Washington's prominent couples.
Marty and Ruth Ginsburg were married for 56 years, and friends often described theirs as a successful marriage of two seemingly quite different individuals.
He liked to cook, entertain and tell jokes for guests at their Watergate apartment. His wife, on the other hand, is serious, soft-spoken and shy. They met on a blind date at Cornell University in 1951 when she was 18. They married three years later.
Since they were teenagers, he was "my best friend and biggest booster," Ruth Ginsburg said in an earlier interview. He was "the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain."
Her husband summed up their happy marriage this way: "As a general rule, my wife does not give me any advice about cooking, and I do not give her any advice about the law," he told the New York Times in 1997. "This seems to work quite well on both sides."
He will be buried in Arlington Cemetery.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
