Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 9.13: Devine Inspiration


Supreme Court clerks continue to flood the NYT wedding pages this month, creating grim LEWW odds for mere-mortal Cornell grads and Skadden associates. Like Troy playing Florida or North Texas playing Alabama, these folks are welcome to suit up, but the only question is how bad their whuppin’ is going to hurt.
Here are your three finalist couples for the week:

1. Rebecca Mancuso and Andrew Brunswick
2. Erin Gustafson and David Curtiss
3. Kathleen Devine and David Newman

Evaluate these newlyweds, after the jump.



1. Rebecca Mancuso and Andrew Brunswick
(Buy them a cheese plane.)
The Case:
– On the one hand, this couple is all-Ivy. On the other hand, one of their Ivies is Cornell. The bride has both an undergraduate and a law degree from that institution. The groom was magna at Harvard and is now a second-year medical student at Columbia.
– Rebecca’s an associate at Simpson Thacher. Her late mother, Harriet Stein Mancuso, was a partner at Davis & Cox.
The Case Against:
– Young Andrew had something of a confidence problem, blowing four opportunities over five years to put the moves on Rebecca (“[G]irls were foreign objects to me”).

2. Erin Gustafson and David Curtiss
(Buy them a thermometer.)
The Case:
– This bride was summa at Gettysburg College and has a JD, cum laude, from Duke. She’s an associate in Skadden’s New York office. The groom also graduated from Gettysburg College (they met there, but didn’t start dating until after they graduated) and recently received his JD, cum laude, from American. He’ll start at Shearman & Sterling in February.
The Case Against:
– They root for Duke and the Yankees. LEWW happens to share these particular obsessions, but we must acknowledge that they’re two of the more clichéd/annoying sports allegiances out there. Throw in the Cowboys and the Lakers, and you’ve run the table on bland bandwagon fandom.

3. Kathleen Devine and David Newman
(Buy them a garment bag.)
The Case:
– These two met at Columbia as undergrads. Kate, who has a medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is a resident in obstetrics and gynecology at NYU. David has a JD from Yale and is currently an associate at Jenner.
– David has a beautiful clerkship three-layer-cake: Judge Jed Rakoff of the Federal District Court, Judge Robert Katzmann of the Second Circuit, and, next July, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court! Yum.
The Case Against:
– Their “proposal story” strongly implies that Kate had been pestering David to get engaged, so he faked her out by not popping the question during their fabulous Turks and Caicos vacation. Instead, he left the ring for her to find in their apartment upon their sweaty and grumpy return. (At the risk of being too hard on Kate and David, here’s a general thought for the ladies: If you wouldn’t make such asses out of yourselves badgering your boyfriends for a ring, they wouldn’t feel the need to respond with lame, passive-aggressive stunts like this.)
The Verdict:
We (and Kate) might have preferred that David propose on a beach at sunset, but that’s a minor quibble. The truth is that Team Devine-Newman is head and shoulders above the competition this week. Congratulations and best wishes to the newlyweds!

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