Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 06.03: The Golden Road

“Nobody’s finished, we ain’t even begun” is a good description of our progress on this column over the past few days. We apologize for serving up your weekly dose of LEWW a bit later than usual.
Some good weddings we aren’t writing about this week: another seedling from William Howard Taft’s family tree, hot lesbians, and an Ashley’s Ice Cream heiress.
Here are this week’s featured couples:

1. Kathleen Rubenstein and Hays Golden
2. Serena Hoy and James Reilly
3. Catherine Bennett and Sophien Bennaceur

More about these couples, after the jump.
Also, some of you have inquired about submitting nominations for Couple of the Week from outside the pages of The New York Times. We’re confused. Surely you’re not suggesting that we grant the LEWW imprimatur to the undignified matings of commoners?
(In all seriousness: Although NYT wedding section is the only one LEWW reads religiously, we’d love to hear about notable nuptials our readers spot elsewhere. Just send us an e-mail early in the week.)

1. Kathleen Rubenstein and Hays Golden
The Case:
– This duo packs plenty of academic prestige. Too bad it’s all from one blighted corner of the Windy Apple. They met as undergrads at the University of Chicago (read about their courtship here), and they’re both returning there this fall, Kathleen for a law degree and Hays for a PhD in economics.
– Kathleen is from Golden, Colorado, and she’s marrying a guy named Hays Golden — which is also a variety of corn. (That reminds us about this recent article on parents choosing baby names that “Google well.” We love how these parents assume that the search results for their wonderful offspring will be things they’ll want the world to know. When their little princess turns 16 and gets a webcam, they may wish they’d settled for something less distinctive. But we digress.)
– The groom’s father, Arthur Golden, is the author of Memoirs of a Geisha, the upscale chick-lit title in all the brainy girls’ beach bags during the late ’90s. (Arthur is also the cousin of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the The New York Times.)
The Case Against:
– Hays has used his economics skills to provide “research assistance” to his mother-in-law. And from the looks of the picture above, that’s the woman he’s marrying. (Either that, or we missed the episode of Dawson’s Creek where James Van Der Beek ends up with Capeside High’s kinky librarian.)

2. Serena Hoy and James Reilly
(Buy them a popover pan.)
The Case:
– Serena and James are heavy hitters on Capitol Hill. She’s legal counsel to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and he’s chief of staff to Senator Tom Carper of Delaware.
– These Article I superstars were united in marriage by an impressive Article III officiant: Judge Merrick B. Garland of the DC Circuit.
– Both the bride and the groom started off at state schools — Serena went to the University of Arizona, and James to the University of Delaware. And that was enough public education for them! Serena jetted away to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and later picked up a law degree from Yale; James went to Duke for a master’s in environmental management.
The Case Against:
– It’s our job to criticize people, but our heart’s not in it with these two. They seem classy but not at all pretentious, and they look radiantly in love. Our only complaint is a minor one: They have an “Our Story” section on their wedding website, but when you click on it, hoping for some juicy/sappy/sordid details, you just see polite suggestions that their guests donate to the Refugee Reunification Project and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Damn them for being so refined!

3. Catherine Bennett and Sophien Bennaceur
(Buy them a gravy ladle.)
The Case:
– The groom, who graduated from the University of Tunis, founded and runs a company that does technology consulting blah-blah-blah. The bride graduated from Sarah Lawrence and Georgetown Law and is a business affairs lawyer at the William Morris Agency.
– No offense to Catherine, but the legal titan in the family is her father, Skadden superlawyer Robert S. Bennett, who represented Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit and memorably called the allegations “tabloid trash with a legal caption.” (Catherine’s Uncle Bill is GOP activist William J. Bennett; the Bennett brothers were famously on opposite sides of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.)
The Case Against:
– Their whirlwind romance (they met last August) was born in the Chanel boutique in SoHo, where they were attempting to buy the same handbag. “She won the handbag and his heart,” reports the Times. “On their first date, they split a salad and got matching pedicures,” the article does not go on to say.
– Catherine is pictured solo. What, then, can we assume about Sophien?
Possibility 1: The editors cropped him out, because (a) he is a grotesque troll, the sight of whom would cause NYT readers to barf up their Sunday brunches, or (b) his eyebrows were not lined up with Catherine’s.
Possibility 2: He is Amish.
Catherine’s undeniable beauty makes the troll scenario implausible, and although it’s true that the Tunisian Amish are second only to the Japanese in their passion for Chanel, everybody knows they buy their leather goods at Saks. Conclusion: Sophien is a casualty of the NYT’s draconian eyebrow rule.
The Verdict:
Powerful jobs, a Rhodes Scholarship, and Yale Law School — Team Hoy-Reilly is unbeatable this week! Congratulations!

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