Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 8.17 and 8.24: Astrophysical

LEWW is fascinated by ATL’s Douchiest Law School contest. Official results haven’t been announced yet, but based on our preliminary read, Yale seems to have notched a decisive first-round victory over the University of Texas, and it looks like Harvard has trounced UCLA. Stanford Law School, however, appears to have been decisively out-douched by lowly Georgetown. Conclusion: The relationship between douchiness and prestige is not linear.
This week’s weddings feature two YLS grads and two SLS grads, so these lawyer newlyweds are undeniably prestigious. But are they also representative of their respective institutions’ reputations for d-baggery? We’ll let you make the call.
Here are the couples:

1. Wendy Katz and Matthew Waxman
2. Megan Wall-Wolff and Joshua Younger
3. Julia Kripke and Matthew Kellogg

Read all about these couples and vote for your favorite, after the jump.


1. Wendy Katz and Matthew Waxman
(Buy them a Kiddush cup.)
The Case:
– The bride, a Columbia graduate, worked for Hillary Clinton and was Andrew Cuomo’s communications director during his campaign for New York attorney general. She appears to be transitioning out of politics, pursuing a master’s degree in early childhood education from Bank Street College.
– The groom graduated summa from Yale and earned a JD from YLS (he was classmates with Lat), before clerking for Judge Joel Flaum on the Seventh Circuit and Justice David Souter on SCOTUS. He took those sterling credentials into government, serving as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in 2004-05 and principal deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff from 2005-07. Now he’s an associate professor of law at Columbia.
The Case Against:
– “Deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in 2004-05” . . . wasn’t that . . . yes, it was: the Bush administration! Doesn’t that make him, like, super-evil and un-human-rightsy? And yet a former Hillary Clinton staffer allows him in her bed. Amazing.
(For the record, Waxman reportedly crossed swords with Dick Cheney and David Addington on detainee issues.)
2. Megan Wall-Wolff and Joshua Younger
(Buy them an egg platter.)
The Case:
– This auburn-haired bride was magna at Yale and has a JD from YLS. She’s set to start as a litigation associate at Cravath this fall.
– Beneath that mop of hair pulses a formidable brain! The groom was magna at Princeton and has a doctorate in astrophysics from Harvard. He will soon become a Hubble Space Telescope Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he will study “colliding galaxies in the early universe.”
The Case Against:
– We received e-mail calling their NYT video “horrible” and “painful.” We actually think it’s sort of endearing. True, she’s got a Valley Girl voice, and the Harold and Kumar stuff is nowhere near as funny as they think it is. But he’s nerdy-hot, she rocks the pale redhead look, and their awkwardness seems very sexually charged. We say kudos to them.
3. Julia Kripke and Matthew Kellogg
(Buy them a pillowcase.)
The Case:
– More Yale! These two met there as undergraduates (he was cum laude and she was magna), before attending law school at Stanford. The bride, who graduated with distinction, will start at MoFo in November. The groom, a rising 2L, summered at Quinn Emanuel.
The Case Against:
– The mother of the bride “sells vintage jewelry online.” Shudder! Why is it that middle-class women with too much time on their hands inevitably start money-pit jewelry operations?
The Verdict:
Team Katz-Waxman has the sparkly SCOTUS credential, but Team Kripke-Kellogg is double SLS, which is nothing to sneeze at either. And don’t forget Team Wall-Wolff-Younger, the sexy YLS/astrophysicist combo. We’re opening this one up to a reader vote:

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