Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 5.13: Cincinnati Weds

Even in these dark days, as an anxious nation awaits the latest dispatch from the associate salary wars, the wedding machine grinds on. We salute the brave couples who choose to go ahead with their ceremonies in the face of all this uncertainty — after all, how crushing would it be to return from your honeymoon and find your employer on someone’s List of Shame!
Honorable mention this week goes to this couple. (The father of the bride, William Barr, was once Attorney General under George H.W. Bush.) Unfortunately, those two did not make the cut. Here are the lucky lovebirds who did:

1. Michele Molfetta and Carolyn Wolpert
2. Eliza Harrington and Minor Myers III
3. Jennifer Merzon and Christopher Evans

More on this week’s couples, after the jump.

1. Michele Molfetta and Carolyn Wolpert
(Buy them a spice rack.)
The Case:
– LEWW is thrilled to shine the spotlight on the first same-sex couple of our tenure!
– Michele and Carolyn met on the job, at the New York City Law Department’s Office of the Corporation Counsel. This sounds like a monumentally boring place to work. Thumbs-up to these two for giving their co-workers something to gossip about.
– They got married at a Martha Clara Vineyards. We adore vineyard weddings, and how cute that they chose a place with two girly names!
The Case Against:
– The brides’ resumes are not as strong as we typically like to see in this space. Michele went to SUNY Stony Brook and received her JD from Touro College; Carolyn went to Fordham and Georgetown Law. These credentials are certainly nothing to be ashamed of; they’re just not going to win you top honors in the prestige-derby that is the New York Times weddings column.
2. Eliza Harrington and Minor Myers III
(Buy them a grapefruit knife.)
The Case:
– Plenty of Ivy League stuff here! Minor went to Connecticut College and Yale Law School; Eliza went to Harvard and received her MD from the University of Rochester.
– They had an Article III officiant: Judge Peter W. Hall of the Second Circuit.
– Minor is member of the Society of the Cincinnati, “widely considered to be one of the most prestigious and sought-after accomplishments in the hereditary society community.” (The big strand of DNA in the corner of that website is a nice touch, just in case you peons weren’t clear on the “hereditary” aspect.)
The Case Against:
– It looks like the new Mr. and Mrs. will be living apart for a while. He’s leaving Debevoise to teach at Brooklyn Law School, and she’s finishing her pediatrics residency in Rochester.
– No picture. However, we attended law school with the groom, and we’ll testify that Minor is a major hottie! (You can feast your eyes on Minor and his equally handsome brother here.) We weren’t able to find a picture of Eliza, but we can’t imagine a discerning gent like Minor breeding with anyone less than an aesthetic equal. LEWW hereby pronounces Eliza ravishing, sight unseen!

3. Jennifer Merzon and Christopher Evans
(Buy them a swivel peeler.)
The Case:
– The couple met during law school at Duke. She has an undergrad degree from Dartmouth; he was summa at Bowdoin. Now she’s at O’Melveny & Myers and he’s at Quinn Emanuel.
– These two aren’t going down to Team Harrington-Myers without a fight. They hauled out two ministers for their ceremony, one of whom was the Right Reverend Andrew St. John, a vicar. Merely the word “vicar” evokes a pleasant frisson of WASPy privilege. Major points here.
– They have a nice picture. (LEWW apologizes for the large crease appearing across Jennifer’s face; our paper got mangled on the way home from Starbucks.) The groom looks like a less-neurotic Cameron Frye (“When Cameron was in Egypt’s land… let my Cameron go!”) And we like Jennifer’s pearls.
The Case Against:
– The most popular baby names list was just updated, giving us more fodder for one of our favorite topics: name fads. Don’t get us wrong: We know many, many, many lovely Jennifers — but that’s just the point. Total insanity seized parents of baby girls in the 1970s, propelling Jennifer to the number-one spot on the names list for fifteen straight years (1970-84). To the future parents out there thinking that Olivia, Ava, and Isabella sound cute and “fresh”: No. A little research is all it takes to prevent your princess from having to go by her last initial throughout elementary school. (Note: Boys’ names are different. We’ll address this in a future column.)
– We love Dukies, but we have some reservations about Duke grad students as basketball fans. We won’t share the hard numbers on how many January and February nights of LEWW’s undergrad years were spent in a tent; our parents could be reading this, and they were paying for the warm, empty dorm room. But let’s just say that Duke undergrads aren’t hugely impressed by the grad students’ contrived weekend camp-out “experience” in some remote parking lot in September. Bottom line: We urge people to follow LEWW’s advice and form a sports loyalty during their undergrad years rather than jumping on a bandwagon in law school.
The Verdict:
This one was close. We were going to weasel out and flip a coin, but then we saw George Washington’s head on the quarter and it hit us like a bolt of lightning: Washington was the first president — of the Society of the Cincinnati! Congratulations, Team Harrington-Myers!

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