Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 07.22.07: Seeds of Love

Apart from our three finalist couples, there isn’t much to highlight for you this week: just some minor WGWAG action, and, in the Vows column, a nice shout-out to LEWW’s temporary home city.
So without further ado, we bring you our fabulous finalists:

1. Nykeesha Davis and Chad Peterman
2. Deborah Bernstein and David Foster
3. Ellen Bradford and Todd McIntosh

More about these couples, after the jump.

1. Nykeesha Davis and Chad Peterman
(Buy them a pasta canister.)
The Case:
– Nykeesha is a law student at Howard (so technically this is an eagle-hatchling pairing). She spent this summer in New York and Shanghai, where the Weil things are. Her undergraduate degree is from Spelman College; she also has a master’s from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
– “Where’s the Ivy glamour?” you ask. The groom’s got it! He has an undergrad degree from Princeton and a law degree from Georgetown. He’s currently an associate at Patterson Belknap.
The Case Against:
The couple’s website tells the story of how they met:

“At a law firm event, we were unsuspecting partners in a game of pool. After talking for four hours, we planted the seeds to become partners for life.”

Those seeds later sprouted in the Garden of Overly Descriptive Sexual Metaphors.

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2. Deborah Bernstein and David Foster
(Buy them a reversible meat tenderizer.)
The Case:
– Yet another white, male, Harvardized, SCOTUS clerk takes a bride! David just finished a clerkship for Justice Anthony Kennedy (presumably David and Deborah received Kennedy’s signature wedding gift: a waffle iron and some flip-flops).
– David is Harvard-Harvard (magna-magna!); Deborah was cum laude at Dartmouth and has a law degree from UVA (she’s an associate at Bingham McCutchen in DC).
– Of the three Harvard-grad SCOTUS-clerk weddings we’ve featured in July (the others are here and here), this is our favorite picture, by a long shot — and that’s not just because Deborah looks like a typically fun, down-to-earth product of Dartmouth. (LEWW admits to having a prodigious school-crush on Dartmouth graduates. Point to almost any top-20 school, and we can name an ass or five in its stable of alumni. But we’ve never met a Dartmouth grad we didn’t want to pour chocolate over and eat with a spoon.)
– Prompted by the seed-planting above, today LEWW announces a rule (but, like Justice Kennedy, we’ll feel free to ignore it in later rulings): The less personal background divulged in a couple’s public wedding website, the better. The Bernstein-Foster website is nice and restrained.
The Case Against:
– Intermarriage! Discuss. (Just to be clear: LEWW actually loves intermarriage, race-mixing, and a bunch of other things that are probably frowned upon at Maimonides High School. We only put this under The Case Against to fill the space.)

3. Ellen Bradford and Todd McIntosh
(Buy them a dripless bulb baster.)
The Case:
– Ellen is an associate at Sidley in Chicago. She got her JD from Harvard after graduating summa from Clemson. Todd went to West Virginia University and works in software consulting.
The Case Against:
– They met in February 2006, and seven months later they already had a wedding website. Somebody’s been planning her “special day” since she was a wee little princess, hasn’t she? Todd, did she try to get you to spend your third date making tears of joy packets? ‘Cause that would have been a good time to bail, man.
– LEWW understands that you don’t need to be from New York to have your wedding featured in the Times. That said, we do think it’s nice where there’s some semblance of a New York connection — family, alma mater, Jewish heritage — to keep the enterprise faintly dignified. Ellen and Todd are an egregious case of people with zero connection to New York (“Her father is a sales associate with Barnes & Nobel in Eden Prairie [Minnesota].”) thrusting their way onto these pages. They probably are also the type of people who talk about how crazy and dirty New York is and how they could never, ever live there.
The Verdict:
What can we do? As long as the Elect choose to marry, LEWW will be here to bestow upon them the glory they are due. That is our humble role, however it may make us yawn. Congratulations, Team Bernstein-Foster!
(If you’re wondering whether the Legal Eagle Wedding Watch will ever again feature a close race, the Couple of the Month competition for July will be bruising — and you, the readers, will choose the winner! At least three of the Elect will be pitted against each other — Harvard men all — with this weekend’s slot yet to be determined.)

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