Edward M. Ginsburg borrowed a metaphor from his days as a judge when he blew the whistle in 2005 on the cozy cooperation between Big Dig contractors and the state employees who were supposed to be keeping an eye on the project’s flaws.
“They were all married to each other,” Mr. Ginsburg, told the Globe after he issued a blistering report about how contractors and their supposed watchdogs had essentially worked together to keep the public from knowing the full extent of the Big Dig’s failings.
Mr. Ginsburg, who lived in West Newton and whose health was failing, was 90 when he died on June 24. A retired Middlesex Probate and Family Court judge, he had seen firsthand during 25 years on the bench how people get hurt when marriages go wrong.
Appointed by state officials to lead the cost-recovery team that sought monetary damages from contractors for Big Dig errors, Mr. Ginsburg unearthed the relationship between contractors and state employees that hurt taxpayers by thwarting attempts to recoup funds.
He said they seemed to work harder to block the flow of accurate information to his team — and ultimately to the public — than they did to address construction flaws that left the Interstate 93 tunnels riddled with leaks.
Based on evidence Mr. Ginsburg’s team discovered, the state sued Bechtel Corp. and Parsons Brinckerhoff in 2004 for $146 million, claiming that the Big Dig’s private-sector managers publicly made inaccurate cost estimates in order to keep their lucrative contracts moving forward.
As for the project’s flaws, the “obvious” policy of project managers “was not to go public and to try to take care of it” outside of the public view, Mr. Ginsburg told the Globe in late 2005, when the Globe named him Bostonian of the Year.
“But my feeling was that it was not being taken care of,” he said. “I mean, it was going to be ignored or papered over. I just didn’t think that was appropriate. And I wasn’t going to be responsible for somebody getting killed if one of those walls gave out again.”
His words proved heartbreakingly prophetic several months later when a concrete panel collapsed in the tunnels, killing 38-year-old Milena Del Valle of Jamaica Plain.
Within days of her death, the Legislature passed a bill removing Big Dig oversight from Matthew J. Amorello, then the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chairman, who soon resigned.
Becoming the voice of reason in a high-profile controversy that drew national media attention was not what Mr. Ginsburg envisioned when he reached the state’s age limit for judges and retired in 2002.
As he approached his final day, he already had plans in place to create Senior Partners for Justice, which paired top lawyers with indigent clients who needed assistance with divorces, custody battles, and family law issues.
“Sixty-five percent of the people in Probate Court appear without lawyers because they can’t afford them,” Mr. Ginsburg told the Globe after launching the project in late 2002. “I have a friend who says that going into court without a lawyer is like going to a foreign country without a guide.”
Senior Partners for Justice gave “older retired lawyers a chance to stay active,” he said. “It helps the courts by giving them attorneys to argue the cases, too.”
Mr. Ginsburg counted himself among those who wanted to remain vital.
“I don’t believe in retirement,” he said. “I don’t like that term.”
Edward Myles Ginsburg was born in Boston on Oct. 13, 1932, the son of William Ginsburg, a lawyer, and Esther Rosenberg Ginsburg, who volunteered to read to the sight-impaired.
Mr. Ginsburg graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, received a bachelor’s degree in 1955 from Harvard University, and then graduated from Harvard Law School in 1958.
In 1964, he married Julie Eiseman. A social worker and the former director of the International Adoptions agency, she became a lawyer specializing in family law and mediation.
“Of all his accomplishments, we never doubted that he put family first,” said their daughter Jennifer Ginsburg, a district court judge in Worcester.
“He repeated over and over to us that he had a wonderful life, wonderful career, wonderful family,” she said. “He was a very happy person. He had a joie de vivre that was contagious.”
Mr. Ginsburg later wrote that upon graduating from law school, he initially was “an old-fashioned trial lawyer,” specializing in litigation.
“Just at the point when the glow of the challenge was beginning to wear off and the midlife career crisis was setting in, I was appointed a judge of the Probate and Family Court,” he wrote in the 25th anniversary report of this Harvard class.
By the end of his tenure as a judge, he was presiding over about a third of the thousands of divorces granted each year in Middlesex County, which provided a view from the bench of “the experiment that is America,” he told the Globe just before retiring.
“It’s like going to the movies every day,” he said in the 2002 interview. “It’s like seeing live theater. I never get bored.”
Partway into his years on the bench, a colleague led an effort to get Mr. Ginsburg appointed commissioner of Major League Baseball, but Bud Selig got the job. Nevertheless, “the quixotic chase has provided much entertainment,” Mr. Ginsburg wrote in 1995.
In a Harvard class report a few years earlier, he noted that a constant in his life was being a Red Sox fan. “The team still has the capacity to captivate and ultimately break my heart,” he wrote 14 years before the team ended its decades-long World Championship drought.
As a judge, “he never lost sight of what a court’s job is, and that is to resolve disputes among people who can’t resolve them on their own,” William M. Levine, a lawyer who argued cases before Mr. Ginsburg for more than two decades, told the Globe in 2002.
And afterward, when Mr. Ginsburg launched Senior Partners for Justice, he filled “a really important need in our court system,” Herbert Hershfang, a retired municipal court judge, told the Globe. “He had done a wonderful job as a judge, and then as soon as he leaves, he fills this need.”
A private service will be held for Mr. Ginsburg, who in addition to his wife and daughter leaves another daughter, Lauren Madden of Boston; a sister, Lee Herbst of Chicago; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Ginsburg taught courses at Boston College Law School and Suffolk University Law School, and in recent years worked with his son-in-law Jonathan Mannina, the executive director of Community Legal Aid in Worcester.
“Until the day before he died, he was answering questions from the lawyers in that office,” Jennifer said.
In 2014, the American Bar Association’s standing committee on pro bono and public service honored Mr. Ginsburg with an award that recognizes efforts by those who “enhance the human dignity of others by improving or delivering volunteer legal services to the poor or disadvantaged.”
For Mr. Ginsburg, helping others was the only path he wanted to follow in retirement.
“There are a lot of people out there, like me,” he said in 2002, “who don’t want to spend all their time on the golf course.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.