Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 10.14 and 10.21: Plantation, All I Ever Wanted

A brief tour of things we don’t have room to explore in this double edition of LEWW:
This bride is foxy and forty-eight; this bride is twenty-six and hyper-annoying.
– Some MoFo lesbians have made a match of it.
– Graduating cum laude from Harvard wins you admission to a tier-4 law school.
But on to our five featured couples:

1.) Isabel Gillies and Peter Lattman
2.) Lisa Rosenberg and Jonathan Goldin
3.) Ceara Donnelley and Nathan Berry
4.) Jessica Sebeok and Scott Shuchart
5.) Deneta Howland and Bryan Sells

More about the nominees, after the jump.


1.) Isabel Gillies and Peter Lattman
The Case:
– Many of you are familiar with Peter Lattman; he’s the lead writer of the WSJ Law Blog. Normally we wouldn’t be puffing the competition ’cause it gives our own Lat-man the grouchies, but how often does a lawyer — let alone a law blogger — marry an actress? Isabel plays Elliot Stabler’s naggy ex-wife on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
– Peter has an undergrad degree from Harvard and a law degree from Fordham. Isabel, like many pretty people, went to NYU.
– Both are pictured (separately) here. Lattman is quite the yummy dish, LEWW thinks.
The Case Against:
– Both Isabel and Peter get minor previous-marriage demerits.

2.) Lisa Rosenberg and Jonathan Goldin
(Buy them a crystal port glass.)
The Case:
– LEWW has utterly fallen for lovely Lisa. Doesn’t she look like a brunette Heather Graham? And she has a soul! She works with deaf people at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, and she’s studying for a doctorate in speech, language and hearing science.
– Jonathan, who was cum laude at Harvard and magna at HLS, is an associate at the exalted Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, & Katz.
The Case Against:
– The groom’s father, Harrison J. Goldin, was comptroller of New York for 15 years, including during the 1975 financial crisis (FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD) when the city nearly went bankrupt.
3.) Ceara Donnelley and Nathan Berry
(Buy them some owl place card holders.)
The Case:
– Ceara and Nathan met at Yale College, and Ceara is still in New Haven, working on a law degree (she spent her 1L summer at the Brennan Center for Justice).
– Nathan, who pathetically has no graduate degree, is a project manager at the Open Space Institute, a land conservation organization in New York.
The Case Against:
– They started dating after a junior-year week of turkey shooting at Ashepoo, Ceara’s family’s plantation in South Carolina. We’re torn between the upper-crustiness of it being a plantation and the weirdness of it being named Ashepoo.
– “‘The joke is that he fell in love with the plantation and I went along with it,’ Ms. Donnelley said.” Her statement was followed by an awkward pause during which Nathan’s friends coughed and looked at the floor.

4.) Jessica Sebeok and Scott Shuchart
(Buy them a pizza wheel.)
The Case:
– Here we have two wildly accomplished Yale Law School grads. Jess graduated with honors from the University of Chicago and was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford. Her late father was a noted professor of semiotics and a pioneer in the field of biosemiotics. Scott was magna at Harvard and also holds a graduate degree from Oxford.
– Jess is starting a fellowship in the office of the general counsel at Yale. Scott is an associate with the ultra-chic Boies, Schiller & Flexner in New York.
– The Legal Eagle Wedding Watch was honored to watch this wedding in person! We met Jess and Scott where they met each other: The Yale Law Revue. Scott’s Robert Ellickson impression still sets the standard for the genre, and Jess’s sultry turn as Judith Resnick brought the house down. They’re creative, warm, and thoroughly awesome people, and we’re thrilled that they’ll be making each other smile for the rest of their lives.
The Case Against:
– We impaled some old guy’s foot on our stiletto during the horah, and we feel horrible about it. That is all.

5.) Deneta Howland and Bryan Sells
(Buy them a pie dish.)
The Case:
– Deneta and Bryan made the vows column, so we’re privy to the long saga of their courtship. Deneta was the first person Bryan met as a freshman at Harvard, and like a duckling imprinting on its mother, he’s been teetering around behind her ever since, through Harvard, Columbia (law school, for him), the University of Tennessee (medical school, for her), and the back roads of Alabama (where he was clerking for District Judge Myron H. Thompson). He works for the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project; she’s a pediatrician.
– They’re both from Virginia, which allows the article to work in the obligatory Loving v. Virginia cite.
The Case Against:
– Every good love story needs a villain, and in this one it’s the groom’s father, who “does not approve of their relationship” and was not at the wedding. Holy crap. It’s not that we didn’t realize there were still people like this; we just didn’t think they sent their kids to Harvard.
– “We integrated our hearts,” said the groom. Okay, that’s overdoing it.
The Verdict:
– We’re torn again. In our view, Team Sebeok-Shuchart‘s two YLS degrees and other accomplishments give them an edge. But are we biased by our personal knowledge of their immense likeability (and the fantastic mini-desserts at their wedding)?
Let’s have another vote, shall we?

Sponsored