Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Love Wins

Summer is here, so Legal Eagle Wedding Watch is back in full force!

When we began writing this column in 2007, gay people could legally marry each other in one state: Massachusetts. The New York Times style section, our sacred text, had begun printing same-sex announcements only a few years before, under the heading “Weddings and Celebrations” (because most were technically civil unions).

Eight years later, gay people have won the right to marry in all 50 states, and it’s just “Weddings” again.

We wouldn’t have arrived here without the law – and skilled practitioners thereof. So allow us to celebrate the magical combination of lawyers plus marriage with a new edition of Legal Eagle Wedding Watch.

Our finalist couples:

Read on for more about these newlyweds, plus a round-up of the most prestigious lawyer nuptials of the past few months.

Marisa Maleck and Thomas Johnson Jr.
(Buy them a wine refrigerator.)
The Case:
– Our first entry will please LEWW’s more traditional readers. The bride and groom (one of each; that’s still allowed) have law degrees from Chicago and Harvard, respectively.
– Tom, who was magna at Georgetown for undergrad, is of counsel at Gibson Dunn in DC. Gibson may not be the bastion of Republicanism it once was, but the layout of its lawyer profiles is still ultra-traditional in a Ben Franklin kind of way.
– Marisa was cum laude at Amherst and clerked for 11th Circuit Judge William Pryor, up-and-coming feeder of conservative SCOTUS justices. He fed her to none other than Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom she begins clerking this month.

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The Case Against:
– Marisa and her co-clerks have a hard act to follow. The Thomas chambers was absolutely en fuego this year, issuing majorities, dissents, and concurrences at a blistering pace. Thomas authored 37 opinions, seven more than Justice Alito, who came in second. Slacker Elena Kagan had eleven.

Elizabeth Wurtzel and James Freed Jr.
The Case:
Elizabeth Wurtzel is second only to possible Sinatra-spawn Ronan Farrow on the list of recent minor-celebrity attendees of Yale Law School. Wurtzel first achieved notoriety in 1994 for her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation (affiliate link). She later wrote Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (affiliate link), which – judging from Wurtzel’s drug-abusing, boyfriend-stalking, fired-for-possible-plagiarism past exploits – may have autobiographical elements.
– Whether it was Yale, working at Boies Schiller, or fighting breast cancer, something has made Wurtzel a calmer and wiser person. She told the NYT Vows column, “I was just done with crazy.”
– Her refuge from the crazy is James Freed, deputy photo editor for The Daily Mail Online and author of the forthcoming novel The Illiterate.

The Case Against:
– On settling down after decades of tempestuous relationships, Wurtzel writes, “When I was ready to fall in love for real, I stopped behaving badly, and I met someone great, and great for me.” It’s all very lovely and we wish her every good thing. But she’s such a compelling essayist that we can’t help but imagine the powerful divorce memoir she could write.

Nicole Poteat and Emilie Dubois
(Buy them a garlic press.)
The Case:
– Nicole, the bride on the left, is the lawyer here. A graduate of Harvard and Boston College Law School, she’s set to join Goldman Sachs, where she’ll be a senior analyst.
– She was a legislative intern for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2006. (Hey, that was the same year LGBT leaders were threatening to yank their support for Hillary over her opposition to gay marriage.)
– Emilie graduated magna from William & Mary and has a master’s from Columbia and a Ph.D. in sociology from Boston College. She’ll be working at Goldman Sachs too, but in a different group.

The Case Against:
– Let’s be honest: This couple, while moderately impressive, would not have made the top three but for the Supreme Court’s recent decision. But that decision was so historic – and so directly in LEWW’s wheelhouse – that we simply had to honor a same-sex pairing to commemorate it. Yes, our decision to include these brides wasn’t based on precedent, or text, or really anything other than our own Ivy-educated, coastal-elite moral intuition. But it was the right thing to do. Case closed.

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The Verdict:
– Oh, come on. We’ve got SCOTUS clerk versus bad-girl-made-good minor celebrity versus social-issue symbolism. How do we decide between three awesome things? Choose your own ending, readers. And best wishes to all our legal-eagle newlyweds!

Earlier: Congratulations And Best Wishes To Elizabeth Wurtzel And Jim Freed On Their Marriage!

Honorable Mention:
Randall Johnston and Thomas Bennett (2, NYU, Paul Hastings, Kellogg Huber)
Alexandra Costanza and Morgan Whitworth (2, Duke, Latham)
Carolyn Stoner and Yotam Barkai (2, NYU, Skadden, Boies)
Amanda Vaughn and John Visclosky (2, Harvard, UPenn)
Sochie Nnaemeka and Edward Fertik (Georgetown)
Emily Hankin and James Petrila (2, UVA, Steptoe)
Emily Cole and Alexander Groden (2, Harvard, Kirkland, Sidley, Bartlit Beck)
Ariel Werner and Ari Savitzky (2, NYU, Wilmer)
Deborah Ho and David Zhou (Yale)
Brianne Frazier and Andrei Greenawalt (Yale)
Mathilda McGee-Tubb and Peter Grieco (Boston College)
Kayla Tausche and Jeffrey Izant (Columbia)
Seth Riseman and Iván Espinoza-Madrigal (NYU)
Alexandra Rothman and Jason Costi (Fordham)
Brianna Serrano and Jason Pierce (2, Cornell)
Zoë Bunnell and Christopher Deluzio (2, Georgetown, Weil, Wachtell)
Ashley Futrell and Fletcher Smith III (2, Howard, Yale, Wachtell)
Rachel Salmanowitz and William Kronenberger (Harvard, Latham)
Amelia Huck and Francis Manley V (Harvard, Davis Polk, Simpson Thacher)
Lauren Rasch and John Greil (2, Notre Dame, Harvard)
Lauren Gentry and Alidad Damooei (Yale, Sullivan & Cromwell)
Sonya Pal and Gunjan Sharma (2, Seton Hall, NYU, Skadden)
Shakima Wells and Nwanmegha Young (Columbia, Clifford Chance)
Alison Hashmall and Milosz Gudzowski (NYU, Columbia, Goodwin Procter)
Sarah Woo and Michael Kai (UCLA)
Allie Rubin and Jason Meizlish (NYU, UPenn, Paul Weiss)
Beth Kalisch and Lawrence Levine (Yale)
Ashley Wisneski and William Heward (Boston College)
Amelia Ashton and Evan Thorn (2, Duke, Columbia)
Samantha Brenner and William Pollak (Michigan, Davis Polk)
Barbara Ascher and Strobe Talbott (Cardozo)
Katy Chang and David Hsu (Yale)
Alyssa Yamamoto and Killian Nolan (2, Harvard, Yale, Wilson Sonsini)
Emily Sussman and Kevin Craw (Cardozo)
Louise Wong and Paul Hughes III (Yale, Mayer Brown)
Katherine Lamm and Nicholas Morales (2, Harvard)
Hugh Eastwood and John Holmes III (Yale)
Emily Locker and Daniel Bernstein (Stanford, Arnold & Porter)
Meryl Rosofsky and Stuart Coleman (NYU, Stroock)