NOTEWORTHY DEATHS

LITTLE ROCK — Tax-law expert, Supreme Court spouse

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 tax law, Ginsburg relished his role as the outgoing half of one of Washington’s prominent couples.

The Ginsburgs 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 had met on a blind date at Cornell in 1951 when she was 18. They married three years later.

Since they were teenagers, he was “my best friend and biggest booster,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in an earlier interview. He was “the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain.”

Martin David Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 10, 1932. He graduated from Cornell in 1953 and, after two years of service in the U.S. Army, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1958.

He and Ruth moved to New York City, where he joined a law firm and she became a leading advocate for women’s rights at the American Civil Liberties Union. They moved to Washington in 1980 when Ruth was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

In 1993, Ruth Ginsburg became the second woman to join the Supreme Court.

Martin Ginsburg is survived by his wife; two children, Jane C. Ginsburg and James S. Ginsburg; and four grandchildren.