Harvard Law Review, Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court Clerks, Weddings

Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Leiter Than Air

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Sometimes LEWW scans a wedding announcement with bated breath, praying that we’ll find a law degree so we can write about a couple. We were crushing on Peanut Wong and David Hattaway before we even clicked on their link. But alas, she’s a dental student (of course she is), and he’s an electrical engineer. So we’ll just say this: If you eat the Wong Peanut, you could die.

On to this week’s featured couples:

Elena Saxonhouse and Tulley Rafferty

Kathleen McArthur and Matthew Gross

Alice Brown and Michael Leiter

Get the scoop on these couples — including their registries, résumés, and cheesy wedding websites — after the jump.

Elena Saxonhouse and Tulley Rafferty
(Buy them a potted succulent.)

The Case:
– This bride graduated magna from Yale and has a JD from Stanford. She works as a staff lawyer at the Sierra Club in
San Francisco. Her groom, a graduate of the University of California at San Diego, is a lead programmer at a video game company in San Rafael.

Sponsored

The Case Against:
– Their wedding web site leaves no environmentalist cliché unexplored: There’s a post-wedding camp-out, a stern warning against gift-wrapping their wedding gifts, an exhortation to use public transportation, etc., etc.

Kathleen McArthur and Matthew Gross
(Buy them a spoon rest.)

The Case:
– Glorious résumés: Both the bride and groom are HLS grads, and both are associates at tony Sullivan & Cromwell. She has an undergraduate degree, with honors, from the University of Texas. He graduated magna from Yale.
– There’s a place on their wedding website for guests to submit music suggestions for their reception. A nice idea, as long as your bratty 12-year-old cousins don’t take it over with requests for “Gold Digger.”

The Case Against:
– Matt proposed on a Tuesday afternoon when the couple left their desks at S&C and took a walk. This makes for a rather lame engagement story. Was this the best idea Matt could come up with, or S&C is such a sweatshop that this was their only chance to get away? Either way: fail.

Alice Brown and Michael Leiter
(Buy them a trivet.)

Sponsored

The Case:
– The bride graduated from Stanford and has a JD from Georgetown. She’s a director at the National Partnership for Women and Families in Washington, a nonprofit dedicated to seeing people get paid for not working. Her father is a partner in Milbank Tweed’s DC office.
– The groom graduated from Columbia and earned a JD, magna, from HLS. He was President of the Harvard Law Review, so naturally he joined the Elect, clerking for Justice Stephen Breyer in OT 2001. He is the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, which is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Case Against:
– Leiter’s agency was widely criticized (including by the NYT) for failing to focus on the threat posed by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 2009 Christmas Day “Pants Bomber.” NCTC redeemed itself, however, by playing “a pivotal role” in tracking down Osama Bin Laden. Leiter himself was in the White House situation room during the raid on Bin Laden’s compound, which took place just hours after the wedding!

The Verdict:
Counterterrorism is almost as bad-ass as a Justice Breyer clerkship! We salute you, Team Brown-Leiter! And congratulations to all the newlyweds.

Note: LEWW is running every-so-slightly behind. Please don’t freak out and hate-mail us if we haven’t mentioned your wedding; we’re working to catch up and it’ll no doubt appear soon.

Honorable Mention:
Jack O’Kelley III and John Haskins (Yale)

The Rest:
Lindsay Trust and David Newman (Fordham)
Cori Rosen and Dean Kaplowitz (Brooklyn)
Kimberly Friedman and David Kahne (GULC, Stroock)
Marli Porth and John Fanciullo (Suffolk)

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