D.C. Circuit, Douglas Ginsburg, John Roberts, New York Times, Weddings

Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 9.16.07 and 9.23.07

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So LEWW was at a wedding the other weekend, and who should plunk down next to us but a reporter for the NYT Vows section! It was a deeply emotional, humbling experience — like being face-to-face with Gandhi, or Bono — but after we recovered, we waved our ATL press credentials and had a nice chat with the correspondent.
Turns out it was her first Vows column, so we briefed her on the most basic rules of Vows column writing: Make sure you refer to the bride, groom, or both as “honest,” “courageous,” “spirited,” or “down-to-earth,” etc., and definitely include at least one forced simile (“as white as a sun-bleached seashell” is good; “as grounded and unshakable as a redwood” is a two-fer!).
We can’t wait to read about that wedding in this coming weekend’s NYT, but in the meantime, we have two weeks worth of LEWW to catch you up on. Here are our featured couples:

1.) Kate Edmonds and Alex Donner
2.) Denise Delgado and Keith Kerman
3.) Fell Ogden and Charles Gray Jr.
4.) Daisy Wademan and Luc Dowling
5.) Deecy Gray and Douglas Ginsburg
6.) Aielleen Fajardo and Stefan Schick

More about these couples, after the jump.

1.) Kate Edmonds and Alex Donner
(Buy them a vacuum cleaner.)
The Case:
– She’s a wedding planner; he’s a singer and bandleader. Sounds like the marriage of a couple of bad movies, but there’s no denying the career compatibility here.
– Alex went to Princeton and has a law degree from Fordham. Kate is from England, so she’s got a cheeky accent to match the hairdo.
– “Alex was a notorious bachelor,” so Kate didn’t take his flirtations nonsense seriously. But one night, after an event:

[T]hey found themselves alone in an elevator. “I nudged her against a wall, and I said, “Kate this is a date.” And then he kissed her.

Day-um, fetch us an iced beverage! Really, NYT — if we want to get aroused over the Sunday paper, we usually just read William Safire.
The Case Against:
– As a bandleader and seducer of wedding planners, Alex is undoubtedly having more fun than a Fordham Law grad is entitled to.
2.) Denise Delgado and Keith Kerman
(Buy them a peppermill.)
The Case:
– Keith is the chief of operations for the New York City Parks and Recreation Department. That sounds kind of like “janitor” to our ears, but Keith went to Harvard, so we can deduce that his job is in fact hugely prestigious.
– They met in 2006 at a Harvard college reunion.
– Keith’s attorney parents were partners at Kerman & Kerman in Massachusetts. Cute.
The Case Against:
– Denise is a staff lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. The last half of that sentence is more prestigious than the first half (although she did graduate from Harvard and get her JD from Columbia).
3.) Fell Ogden and Charles Gray Jr.
(Buy them a salad spinner.)
The Case:
– The write-up is short, but there are whiffs of major blue-blood prestige on the bride’s side: “summer home in Stonington,” “investment banking for Prudential Securities,” “director of philanthropy,” “Nature Conservancy.” Fell — that’s WASP for “Mary Fell Perkins Ogden” — works at a marketing agency and graduated from Yale.
– The groom was magna at Harvard and cum laude at HLS. He’s now a staff lawyer at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The Case Against:
– This is one of those couples you’re on the fence about until you see a picture, when it becomes immediately clear whether they’re enviable or loathsome. Unfortunately, there’s no photo, so on the fence we must remain.

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4.) Daisy Wademan and Luc Dowling
(Buy them a wok.)
The Case:
– Daisy, who went to Brown and has a MBA from Harvard, is a vice president for blah-blah at Lehman Brothers and the author of Remember Who You Are: Life Stories That Inspire the Heart and Mind.
– Luc was magna at Brown and has both a JD and an MBA from Penn. He works at a hedge fund.
– “The bride is a descendant of Miles Standish and of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins.” Wikipedia entries possibly written by Daisy herself inform us that these three early Americans formed a naughty pilgrim love triangle that inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1858 poem The Courtship of Miles Standish.
The Case Against:
– There’s a long, not-that-exciting story about how they got together. We recommend reading it only if you think “discounted cash flow” = pillow talk.
5.) Deecy Gray and Douglas Ginsburg
(Buy them a can opener.)
The Case:
– The bride is the director of Frontiers of Freedom, a nonpartisan public policy institute. As for the groom, you may have heard of him: He’s the chief judge of the DC Circuit!
– Doug and Deecy’s officiant was the very crown prince of Article III royalty: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. And wait — there’s more glittering judicial resplendence! The ceremony actually took place inside that sacred temple of our profession, the Supreme Court building. (Don’t look down, LEWW readers — these heights are dizzying.)
– How cool does Judge Ginsburg look now, twenty years after his nomination to the Supreme Court was withdrawn? Pot-smoking is pretty much a non-issue these days unless you’ve toked up with naked Congressional pages. And unlike Robert Bork, Ginsburg didn’t leave the bench in a huff and launch a career of bitter, gloom-mongering sourpussery. A class act, LEWW thinks.
The Case Against:
– Deecy and Doug’s friends must be some stingy bastards, because nothing has been purchased from the couple’s Crate & Barrel registry. LEWW calls upon ATL readers to help stock the newlyweds’ cupboards! (Yes, 42 champagne flutes is arguably overkill. But at at 4 bucks each, they’re almost disposable.)

6.) Aielleen Fajardo and Stefan Schick
(Buy them a muffin pan.)
The Case:
– Nice educational cred in this lawyer-lawyer duo. The bride is Yale/UCLA, and the groom is Brown/Columbia.
– He’s an associate in the Manhattan office of Loeb & Loeb; she works for the Bank of New York Mellon, specializing in Patriot Act compliance.
– With its high vowel-to-consonant ratio, Aielleen’s name indicates there’s a good chance she’s a stunner. And the picture does not disappoint! The groom performs with Chicago City Limits, an improv comedy group, so he’s not a loser either.
The Case Against:
– They’re cute and fun. But they’re no Doug and Deecy, and we all know where this column is headed.
The Verdict:
Not even close. The nuptials of Team Gray-Ginsburg may be the LEWW wedding of the year. Congratulations!

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