Legal Eagle Wedding Watch (Bonus Edition): Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein Get Hitched

Back in May, we broke the news of the engagement of celebrity professors Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power. Both are Harvard-trained lawyers and high-profile advisers — current in Sunstein’s case, and former in Power’s case (see Monstergate) — to fellow HLS grad Barack Obama.

In the fall, Professor Sunstein will be teaching law at Harvard, where Professor Power teaches at the Kennedy School of Government. His relationship with Power reportedly played a major role in his decision to leave the University of Chicago, his longtime home in legal academia.

If you doubted our original report about the Power-Sunstein engagement, your doubts were misplaced. It’s now official. From the Irish Independent:

The man who brought them together was unavoidably detained elsewhere. Barack Obama has the small matter of a US presidential campaign to fight.

[On Friday], a world away in rain-lashed Co Kerry, two of his friends tied the knot. The wind blew and the rain poured down but it could not spoil a very special Fourth of July for Samantha Power.

Obama’s former adviser married Professor Cass Sunstein in Mary Immaculate Church, on the edge of the sea at Loher near Waterville, Co Kerry.

Irish-American academic and writer Samantha (38) arrived for her marriage to the 54-year-old law professor at the church in the parish of Caherdaniel, the home turf of 19th century politician, the Liberator Daniel O’Connell.

The couple met while working on the Obama presidential campaign.

The celebrated Sunstein and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Power are boldface names, and the person who brought them together is probably going to be the next President of the United States. But because their nuptials were not featured in the august pages of the New York Times — we wonder why they didn’t submit themselves (because they would have made the cut if they had) — Power and Sunstein are not eligible for consideration in the next installment of Legal Eagle Wedding Watch.

But we obviously could not let their wedding go unremarked. Hence this special report, which you can think of as “LEWW Supp.”

More details, after the jump.

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Still from the Independent:

Ms Power arrived on the button of 4.30pm in a champagne coloured Lexus car bedecked with silk roses and hydrangeas driven by her uncle, Garry Horgan, from Cork.

A Lexus — quite nice. But was it a hybrid?

Waiting a respectable five minutes until she got the nod from parish priest Fr Fergal Ryan, Ms Power in her cream all-lace dress and veil resplendent against her red hair, entered the church on the arm of her step-father Edmund Bourke.

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We’re sure she was a vision. As noted in our prior coverage, Professor Power is quite the hottie. Not many Harvard profs have had pictorials in Men’s Vogue.

There were thank-you notes in the wedding leaflet for local organisers and a special word for 18-year-old Ellyn Ruddick-Sunstein the daughter of the groom for providing support and cheer “and for approving”.

Prayers of the faithful included one “for the victims of cruelty and injustice, for those who protect wildlife and animals, and those who are poor and persecuted”.

Like Hillary Clinton, whom Power famously called “a monster,” and who has been relentlessly attacked by both the left and the right over the years? [FN1]

Setting politics aside — which is hard to do, in such a big election year — ATL sends its congratulations and best wishes to Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein. They’re a well-matched pair, in terms of their brilliance, fabulosity, and abiding love of country. We look forward to seeing the heights to which they will ascend, together, in the administration of President Obama.

[FN1] Okay, the Clintons aren’t exactly “poor” — a nine-figure gross income in eight years lies well above the poverty line. But even her detractors can’t deny that HRC has been harshly treated, by Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as by the media and the blogosphere.

From campaigns to champagne as friends of Obama tie the knot [Independent (Ireland)]