Contests, Reader Polls, Weddings

Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Vote for July's Couple of the Month!

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Here it is: the breathlessly anticipated SCOTUS Smackdown! To be precise, we should note that not all of our July couples featured a Supreme Court clerk. But Gelman-Bash (Scalia), Ingber-Metlitsky (Roberts), and Bernstein-Foster (Kennedy) are all Elect-able pairings. We can’t wait to see who gets to strut around One First Street with ATL’s coveted Couple of the Month crown!
Vote for your favorite (or least un-favorite) Justice, vote for the best picture, or vote against the Elect by picking DeLeonardo-Frey or Goldfein-Holden — just vote! Click on the link below for recaps on each couple.
When you’re ready to make your choice, here’s the poll:

1. Jennifer DeLeonardo and Adam Frey
(Buy them a cooling rack.)
The Case:
– Jennifer and Adam met at admitted students’ weekend at UVA Law (read the story on their website). The bride was cum laude at Middlebury College; the groom was magna at Duke.
– They’ve found employment at prestigious law firms. Jennifer is in Sullivan & Cromwell‘s DC office; Adam is at Patton Boggs.
The Case Against:
– “Jennifer Marie DeLeonardo” doesn’t sound like a Jewish name, but they were married by a cantor. Has another good Jewish boy fallen to a shiksa?
– The Patton Boggs attorney photos do a disservice to this proud genre. The firm went well beyond headshots or even torso shots; they’ve got every subject perched on a stool with most of the body showing, looming ominously over the camera, with awkward hand contortions all over the place. Adding to the full-frontal freakiness, the lighting isn’t great, and some of the people — particularly female associates — have bizarre, pained, facial expressions (help me!). If Patton Boggs is trying to intimidate the crap out of us with the sausage fingers, crotch-grabbing, and young women in bondage, it’s totally working.

2. Zina Gelman and John Bash III
(Buy them a bath towel.)
The Case:
– We’ll start with a shot of the strong stuff. This groom is about to start the very plummiest of plummy legal jobs: a clerkship for Justice Antonin Scalia! John heads to One First Street from the chambers of DC Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavenaugh, but he left Judge Kavenaugh a little something to remember him by: his Bash-ful bride! Zina will begin clerking for the young judicial superstar later this month.
– With four Harvard degrees between them, John and Zina bleed a more prestigious shade of crimson than the rest of us. They met in Cambridge as undergrads (she graduated cum laude; he was summa) and continued their romance at HLS (she was cum laude; he was magna). A tipster e-mailed us with background:

Zina originally attended Columbia Law School, where she made the Columbia Law Review, but decided to transfer to Harvard when she also got onto Harvard Law Review (She took the competitions back-to-back; merely finishing both would be impressive, but getting onto both journals is amazing!).

Indeed. And we don’t need any tipsters to alert us to Zina’s extreme foxiness. What a beauty!
The Case Against:
– Typical overachievers, John and Zina didn’t stop at planning their ceremony for 7/7/07 — they also timed it to begin at 7 o’clock! All 777 guests then feasted on a seven-course dinner at which seven virgins were sacrificed, the Times did not report.
– LEWW has learned that John and Zina dabble in animal torture. If you’re a sensitive soul, you may not want to click on this link. Tragic.

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3. Rebecca Ingber and Anton Metlitsky
(Buy them a cake lifter.)

The Case:
– We’re kicking things off the same way we began last week: with a SCOTUS-bound son of Harvard. Anton penciled in his wedding and honeymoon between a Garland clerkship and the real happiest day of his life — when he’ll report for work at One First Street as a clerk for Chief Justice Roberts!
– Anton met Bec, as she’s called, when the two were 1Ls in the same section (read about it on their website). She now works for the State Department. He was summa at Penn for undergrad; she was cum laude at Yale.
The Case Against:
– That picture! It’s a wee bit tawdry, and yet . . . [LEWW strokes chin] we pronounce it . . . delicious! The chest hair of the Elect is just the faintest bit silkier than that of the average man, no?

4. 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.)

5. Briana Goldfein and Matthew Holden
(Buy them a brownie pan.)
The Case:
– The stunning bride went to Tufts and has a dual master’s from Bank Street College. She’s now a second-grade teacher in New York. The groom graduated with distinction (whatever that means — speak Latin, please!) from Emory and went to law school at the University of Miami. Now he’s an associate at Skadden.
– Briana and Matthew have a cute–if somewhat confusing–story involving JDate.com (“the undisputed leader in Jewish dating“), cancelled memberships, instant messages, and falling asleep with the computer on. Delve in if you dare. We also note that this is surely the most attractive couple in the history of online dating. JDate, get this picture on your site, stat!
The Case Against:
– Imagine that you’re shoveling coal in a sweltering dungeon with a bunch of other drudges, and the schmuck next to you announces that he’s moving to an upgraded dungeon: “I just married the slave-master’s daughter, suckas!” That’s how the associates on Matthew’s hall at Skadden feel this week: Briana’s dad is the head of Skadden’s antitrust group.

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