AI-generated editorial illustrations—not archival photographs.

Between midnight and two in the morning, Marty Ginsburg ate dinner. Radiation treatment for cancer left him unable to eat any earlier during his last year at Harvard Law School, so the meal came late: “my bad hamburger usually,” his wife recalled. Then he dictated his senior paper to her and went back to sleep. At about two, she opened her own books.

She was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a second-year law student with a toddler at home. She would become the second woman on the US Supreme Court, serving from 1993 until her death in 2020. He was Martin D. Ginsburg, later a leading tax lawyer and a beloved Georgetown professor.

They met at Cornell and were married for 56 years, from 1954 until his death in 2010. Each moved for the other’s career, each nursed the other through cancer, and in 1993 he worked behind the scenes to bring her name to President Bill Clinton, who nominated her to the Supreme Court.

The familiar version of that marriage features a devoted husband who cooked and cheered. It is accurate, and it leaves out the hamburgers. The two of them kept taking turns.

A blind date, on one side

Ruth Bader reached Cornell in 1950, aged 17. Marty was a year ahead of her. Cornell’s account credits a practical problem: his roommate, who was dating her dormitory neighbour, had no car, and Marty owned a grey Chevrolet.

Marty told it differently. “The truth is, it was a blind date only on Ruth’s side. I cheated,” he said years later. He had asked a classmate to point her out in advance.

He dated the meeting to 1950. The Supreme Court’s 2010 statement said 1951. Ruth’s own answer was her first year, an academic year that spans both.

He had a girlfriend at Smith and she had a boyfriend at Columbia Law School. “That whole first year we were just good friends,” she said. “He would tell me everything on his mind.”

What set him apart became a line she repeated many times: he was “the first boy I met who cared that I had a brain.” She also had a theory about why. “He was so sure of his own ability,” she said, “that he never regarded me as any kind of threat.”

Illustrated grey 1950s sedan parked on a tree-lined college road in autumn.
AI-generated contextual illustration evoking the grey Chevrolet Ruth Ginsburg remembered; not a depiction of Cornell or of the couple’s actual car.

Fort Sill, Harvard and the radiation year

They married on 23 June 1954 at his parents’ home on Long Island, just as she graduated and a year into his Harvard law degree. The Army then took him to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for two years, where he taught at the Artillery School. He later described the posting as time “far from school, far from career pressures, and far from relatives.”

Among their wedding gifts was The Escoffier Cookbook, and Marty, a chemistry major, started at page one. “Ruth was a fairly terrible cook,” he explained in a 1996 speech, “and for lack of interest unlikely to improve.”

Their daughter, Jane, was born in 1955. When Ruth entered Harvard Law School the following year, Jane was 14 months old and her mother was one of nine women in a class of more than 500.

Then, in his final year and her second, Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer. “Daily radiation that seemed to go on forever,” she remembered. Four weeks of treatment became five, then six.

Ruth gathered notes from his classes, typed his papers, looked after Jane and kept up her own work, on the Harvard Law Review as well as in class. Their classmates organised individual tutorials for him. He attended only the last two weeks of the semester and received the highest grades of his law-school career, she said, “because he had the best tutors.”

“We never thought about the possibility or never talked about the possibility that he might not survive,” she said. He recovered, and graduated magna cum laude in 1958. Not every couple got that reprieve: Gene Wilder became the primary caregiver for Gilda Radner through the ovarian cancer that killed her in 1989.

Illustrated late-night table with a typewriter, law books and a small plate under a single lamp.
AI-generated symbolic illustration of late-night study in the 1950s; not a depiction of the Ginsburgs’ actual home or belongings.

New York, and the tax case that set her path

Marty’s new job at Weil, Gotshal & Manges took the family to New York, so Ruth moved too. She finished her degree at Columbia, graduating in 1959 tied for first in her class, yet no firm in the city offered her a job.

Their son, James, arrived in 1965, and the couple did not negotiate chores, she said at Georgetown in 2019; each did what was needed at different times. Once the women’s movement came alive at the end of the 1960s and Marty saw how important her work was, he took on more of the work at home.

By 1970 she was teaching at Rutgers, and he was a tax lawyer at Weil, which remembers him as the head of its tax department. Their fields seemed unrelated until he came into the bedroom where she worked.

“Ruth, I think you should read this decision,” she remembered him saying. She replied that she did not read tax cases. “Read this one.”

Charles Moritz, a never-married man caring for his mother, had been refused a $600 caregiver deduction open to women and to widowed or divorced men. Ruth read it and said, “Marty, let’s take it.”

Both Ginsburgs appear as counsel in the Tenth Circuit’s 1972 decision, which Moritz won. They split the oral argument, and Marty went first. As they later told her clerks, she tugged at his sleeve when he ran long. “You were cutting into my time,” she told them, in a story retold at her Supreme Court memorial.

When the government sought Supreme Court review, it attached a list of federal statutes that classified by sex. “These were the statutes that my wife then litigated against to overturn over the next decade,” Marty said. In 1971-72 she co-founded the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project with Brenda Feigen, and she went on to argue six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, winning five.

At home, the kitchen was by now entirely his. Ruth, in his telling, had been expelled by her food-loving children. “My wife does not give me any advice about cooking, and I do not give her advice about the law,” he said in 1997. A long marriage can rest on things far from the work that made a name. For Charlie and Shirley Watts, married for almost 57 years, those things were art school, jazz and horses rather than the Rolling Stones. For the Ginsburgs, one of them was dinner.

Illustrated home kitchen with a simmering pot on the stove and a stack of papers at the end of the table.
AI-generated contextual illustration of a shared kitchen and workspace; not a depiction of the Ginsburgs’ actual home.

“A good job in Washington”

In 1958 she had moved for his job. In 1980 he moved for hers.

President Jimmy Carter nominated her to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on 14 April 1980, and the Senate confirmed her on 18 June. Marty, by then Beekman Professor at Columbia, joined the Georgetown faculty and was also of counsel at the law firm Fried Frank. His firm biography gave the reason with a straight face: he moved “when his wife obtained a good job in Washington.”

He kept a formidable reputation of his own. He co-wrote the treatise Mergers, Acquisitions, and Buyouts, and Harvard’s law dean said he “set the gold standard for tax scholarship and practice.” When he declined payment for representing Ross Perot, Perot endowed a Georgetown chair in his honour.

Illustrated pair of empty reading chairs by a window overlooking a river and a domed skyline at dusk, with a blank yellow legal pad on a side table.
AI-generated symbolic illustration of a Washington evening; the pad is blank, and this is not a depiction of the couple’s home or of Marty Ginsburg’s letter.

The 1993 nomination

In 1993 he put that standing to work. Clinton administration officials said, NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported, that his “relentless and artful behind-the-scenes lobbying” brought Ruth’s name into the mix of potential nominees.

She wrote in 2016 that “without him, I would not have gained a seat on the Supreme Court.” His efforts included securing the support of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and enlisting lawyers and academics who knew her work. She quoted Ron Klain, then associate White House counsel, who said she “should have been picked for the Supreme Court anyway” but would not have been without her husband.

Those are their judgments, and his was not the only voice. Cornell’s account says Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican, and Attorney General Janet Reno also suggested her to Clinton. The president gave three reasons of his own: her record as a judge, her pioneering work for women and her promise as a builder of consensus. The choice was his, and the record he weighed was hers.

Marty also handled the vetting of the family finances, compiling years of records over a weekend and walking government accountants through them at the couple’s Watergate apartment. “I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me,” he said at the time of the nomination. “It’s not sacrifice; it’s family.”

Clinton announced her nomination in the Rose Garden on 14 June 1993, and the formal nomination followed on 22 June. At the announcement she called Marty “my life’s partner” and “my best friend and biggest booster.” The Senate confirmed her 96 to 3 on 3 August. When she took the oath a week later, he held the Bible.

The yellow pad

The caregiving reversed more than once. Marty was, she wrote, “at my side constantly, in and out of the hospital, during two long bouts with cancer.” Recovering from surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2009, she told him she could not sit through two hours of oral argument. “Yes, you will,” he said, and she did.

By 2010 he was the patient again, and the cancer had spread. The couple marked their 56th anniversary on 23 June 2010 in his room at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, their son James wrote. Two days later the doctors said there was nothing more they could do, and Marty “kept repeating one word: ‘Home.’”

Collecting his things, Ruth opened the drawer beside his bed and found a yellow legal pad. The letter on it, dated 6/17/10, was what James called his father’s “last written statement.”

Marty told her that he had loved and admired her almost since they met at Cornell, “some 56 years ago,” and that watching her rise to the top of the legal world had been a joy. He would think hard, he said, about whether to keep fighting or to let go of life now that its quality had fallen so far. He hoped she would support his decision and understood that she might not. The last line before his name was, “I will not love you a jot less.”

He died at home in Washington on 27 June, aged 78. Totenberg reported that he had told a friend the most important thing he had done was to enable Ruth to do what she had done.

The next morning was the last day of the Court’s term, and Ruth had the majority opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. The Chief Justice could have announced it for her. “So I thought, ‘What would Marty want me to do?’” she said. She went in and read the summary from the bench.

The justices’ spouses later compiled a cookbook in his honour, Chef Supreme: Martin Ginsburg. She served for ten more years. The Ginsburgs rest together at Arlington National Cemetery.

Marty had spent decades as “the first reader and critic” of her drafts. When she read his letter aloud for the Academy of Achievement, she stopped at the line about Cornell to correct him.

“He was wrong about 56,” she said. “It was nearly 60 years. We were married for 56 years.”

Key dates

Date Event
1950-51 Ruth Bader and Martin Ginsburg meet on a blind date during her first year at Cornell.
23 June 1954 They marry at his parents’ home on Long Island.
1954-56 He serves in the US Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Their daughter, Jane, is born in 1955.
1958 After cancer treatment in his final year, he graduates from Harvard Law School and joins Weil, Gotshal & Manges in New York.
1959 She graduates from Columbia Law School, tied for first in her class.
1971-72 She co-founds the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. The Tenth Circuit decides Moritz v. Commissioner in 1972.
1980 She joins the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and he joins the Georgetown faculty.
10 August 1993 She takes the oath as a Supreme Court justice.
27 June 2010 Martin Ginsburg dies at home in Washington, aged 78.
18 September 2020 Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies in Washington, aged 87.

Related reading on Evolvarium: lessons from Michael Caine’s heartfelt journey.

Sources

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