Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: August and September Couples of the Month

As tends to be the case every year, August and September were fabulously prestigious months here on the Legal Eagle Wedding Watch. Three SCOTUS clerks were featured in this space during that period (two in the same announcement!), as well as a minor AutoAdmit celebrity, an astrophysicist, and Biglaw names like Cravath, Mayer, Jenner, and Covington.
Today, we’re asking readers to sort through all this excellence and choose the two most impressive couples of the bunch to advance to the Couple of the Year round.
After the jump, you’ll find recaps of our write-ups on each set of newlyweds, as well as two reader polls, one for each month. Voting ends on Thursday at midnight; we’ll announce the winners on Friday.


August Couples

1. Caroline Nyenke and LaRue Robinson
(Buy them a glass beverage bottle.)
The Case:
– Lawyer marries future doctor. These lovebirds met as undergraduates at Cornell. The groom received a JD from Columbia in May; he’s scheduled to start at Mayer Brown in January. The bride will begin medical school at the University of Illinois later this month.
Vice President Biden would probably call this an articulate-looking picture. We just think they’re cute-cute-cute!
The Case Against:
This site says that LaRue “will serve in the Army as a Judge Advocate General” in 2010. Does Mayer know about this?

2. Brittan Heller and Nathaniel Gleicher
(Buy them a bath sheet.)
The Case:
– Their backgrounds aren’t all-Ivy, but the undergrad schools are certainly Ivy-equivalent: Stanford for the bride, Chicago for the groom. The newlyweds met as law students at Yale and will be heading to South Korea soon to work on various do-gooder projects as Luce Scholars.
– Brittan is a minor celebrity on the legal interwebs as one of the plaintiffs in Doe v. Ciolli, aka the AutoAdmit cyber-bullying case (this Portfolio article is a good place to start if you haven’t heard of the case; ATL’s coverage is here.). The NYT write-up devotes quite a bit of ink to the case and how it brought the couple closer: He “spent a lot of time taking care of her and making sure she was O.K.” and came to see that “[s]he has this steel in her spine and she believes so strongly in justice.” Awwww.
The Case Against:
– Brittan and Nathaniel met when he visited YLS as a prospective student, and according to the article, his attraction to her was what made him choose Yale. Sounds a bit far-fetched, since 80 percent of admits choose Yale anyway. But then we read that when he got to school, he enrolled in a bunch of clubs to get close to her, including the Latino Law Student Association, “even though he wasn’t Hispanic.” Okay, we get it, dude: You were obsessed.
3. 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.

4. Marin Levy and Joseph Blocher Jr.
(Buy them a popcorn bowl.)
The Case:
– Massive prestigery here. First, she was cum laude at Yale; he was magna at Rice. They met as students at Yale Law School; they also both have master’s degrees from Cambridge. They also did twin clerkships for the 2nd Circuit lions of New Haven — she for José Cabranes, who officiated at their ceremony, and he for Guido Calabresi.
The Case Against:
– Still joined at the hip, they’re headed to Duke Law School to teach. Duke was recently voted America’s Douchiest Law School by ATL readers, and it looks like the groom, at least, might feel right at home there.

September Couples

1. Karen Dunn and Brian Netter
(Buy them a bed tray.)
The Case:
– People, the prestige emanating from this announcement is making our eyes water. You’re looking at not one, but two SCOTUS clerks. Together! Potentially mating! Behold them, and wallow in your inferiority.
– The details: They met at YLS (probably one of those conventional courtships we discussed above). She was magna at Brown (America’s douchiest college); he was summa at Michigan.
– She clerked on the DC Circuit for Merrick Garland (who officiated at their wedding), then for Justice Stephen Breyer. Now she’s an associate White House counsel.
– He clerked on the DC Circuit for Judith Rogers and is currently an associate at Mayer Brown. He’ll clerk for Justice Breyer next year.
The Case Against:
– They got married at a venue called the Whiteface Club and Resort. We get that it’s the name of a mountain, but still — has it not occurred to the Whiteface marketing team that, when you’re stuck with a name like “Whiteface Club,” it might be nice to stick a few non-white faces on your website?

2. 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.)

3. Ann Parker and Robert McKeehan
(Buy them a vacuum cleaner.)
The Case:
– Ann and Rob met at Emory Law School, from which they both graduated cum laude (Rob was editor in chief of the law review).
– Ann, who was cum laude at Princeton, is an associate at Arnold and Porter. Rob, who graduated cum laude from Davidson, is an associate at Wilmer.
The Case Against:
– They met on their first day of law school, when Ann tried to get Rob’s attention by talking about Japan:

While Mr. McKeehan seemed unimpressed (“His response was a blank stare,” Ms. Parker recalled) he was in fact delighted, but thought it was too early in the game to seem so interested.
“It was the first day of school,” he said. “You’re playing things close to the vest.”
He eventually struck up a friendship with Ms. Parker, in part because he was looking for a study partner. “Ann was a pretty easy choice, fun to be around, a great sense of humor and easy on the eyes,” he said.

Well, well. Rob, you’re quite the smooth operator. It also appears that you neglected to shower before your engagement photo, but maybe that’s just how the playas play down at Emory Law School.

4. Monique Mendez and Graham O’Donoghue
(Buy them a salad fork.)
The Case:
– These two cuties met at Columbia, where each received a law degree. Monique, a Yale grad, clerked for Judge Barbara Jones (SDNY) and is now an associate at Covington & Burling. Graham, who was magna at Harvard, clerked on the DC Circuit for Senior Judge Laurence Silberman (“the man who saved the Second Amendment“) before serving as an associate counsel to George W. Bush. He’s now an associate at Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
– LEWW spent a summer working with Graham many years ago, and he was — we say this with love — one of the whitest white boys we’ve ever known. That, of course, was before he was thrust into the gritty world of Harvard, Columbia Law, and the Bush White House. We’d have expected him to marry an icy-blonde Ann Coulter type, so it’s delightful to see that the new Mrs. O’Donoghue is of a different hue, so to speak.
The Case Against:
– Nearly a week after the wedding, ten of their twelve silver teaspoons languish unpurchased on their Tiffany registry. People are so cruel.

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