Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 9.14: Brief Interlude

What did you miss if you didn’t peruse last Sunday’s NYT weddings section? The marriage of Theodore Roosevelt V, for starters. Also, a whole lot of gayness! We counted seven same-sex weddings on this week’s list, which we suspect is a an all-time high. (And how sociologically interesting that all seven were men marrying men!) None of this week’s same-sex weddings made it into the finals, but LEWW is delighted to reflect (in a rare moment of seriousness) on how much has changed since August 2002, when the paper announced that it would include same-sex weddings for the first time. Long live love!

Here are this week’s couples:

1. Tania Brief and Andrew Ehrlich

2. Jori Finkel and Michael Lubic

3. Laura Millendorf and Mark Yopp

Click on the link below to read all about these legal lovebirds.


1. Tania Brief and Andrew Ehrlich

Sponsored

(Buy them a spatula).

The Case:

– Two lawyers; three Ivy degrees. The bride is Yale/Georgetown; the groom is Harvard/Harvard. Tania recently completed a clerkship with Judge William H. Pauley III (SDNY); next month she’ll start at Bronx Defenders (we profiled one of her future colleagues a few weeks ago). Andrew is an associate at Paul Weiss.

– Both of their mothers have worked as office managers for their fathers’ businesses. We find this quite impressive and hope that Tania and Andrew have inherited their parents’ superhuman ability to put up with each other.

The Case Against:

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– This isn’t a criticism of the couple, but it’s prompted by a page on their website where they explain what their dress code (“garden party”) actually means. Contrast that helpful and reasonable behavior with the atrocities described in this article, wherein various brides try to justify stringent and imperious sartorial requirements for not just their attendants, but all the guests (i.e., no yellow or pink, all white, or all dark colors). We thought honeyfunds were tacky, but this is really a ghastly new level of guest-abuse. (And again, we emphasize that Tania and Andrew are not guilty of it.)

2. Jori Finkel and Michael Lubic

(Buy them a 2-tier étagère.)

The Case:

– Michael has two degrees from Yale (BS, cum laude, and master’s in economics) and two from the University of Chicago (JD and MBA). He is a partner at Sonnenschein, where his bio burbles with platitudes like “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

– His bride was summa at Columbia and has a master’s from Stanford. She’s a freelance arts reporter in Los Angeles.

The Case Against:

– We beg you to check out that trendy-hideous étagère they registered for. The thing will probably triple in value by their 25th anniversary, if only as a piece of what-were-they-thinking kitsch.

3. Laura Millendorf and Mark Yopp

(Buy them a trivet.)

The Case:

– This bride and groom met during law school at Emory. She graduated from Northwestern and he from Wake Forest.

– Laura is an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. Mark is an associate at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan.

The Case Against:

– Emory may be the Harvard of the South, or one contender for the title. But that’s still not Ivy League, hon.

The Verdict:

We think Team Brief-Ehrlich, a likeable two-lawyer pairing with very strong educational credentials, is the clear winner in this relatively conventional field.