Gail Serota was everything to her husband, Joseph Serota: a coworker, a wife, a classmate, a confidant, a fellow gossip.

The pair met at Princeton, in Hebrew 101, and immediately bonded over their public school roots. She was, as Joseph put it, much more brilliant than he was, so meticulous and intelligent that many of her classmates would copy her class notes, without which they say they might not have graduated from law school.