Harvard, Harvard Law Review, Weddings

Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Indian Summer

Columnist Laurie Lin sizes up the latest featured couples: no tackiness here, just limitless love and legal prestige.

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We’re calling it. Wedding registries are over. Linking to newlyweds’ wish lists has long been a LEWW specialty, but we’ve noticed they’re increasingly hard to find. This week marks the first time that none of our featured couples has a public registry (one couple has a password-protected one — if you’re privy to the name of their “four-legged ringbearer,” have at it).

We’ll never forget this 2010 couple and their nearly $80,000 list of demands. (Five years later, you can still buy them a $1,100 whiskey decanter.) If excess like that is being rejected for the tackiness it is, that’s a great thing, even if in some cases it’s being replaced by requests for cash, which dwell in an etiquette gray area.

We mourn the decline of the modest Crate & Barrel registry, with its dish towels and $60 place settings. As long as couples have those, we’ll link ’em.

On to our featured couples. No tackiness here, just limitless love and legal prestige:

Sean Cuddihy and Luis Urbina
The Case:
– So cute! So Harvard! This couple met as undergraduates there and are now 3Ls at Harvard Law School. They were married in the courtyard of one of Harvard’s residential colleges, and their officiant was Professor Martha A. Field, Langdell Professor of Law at HLS.
– There’s more Harvard! Luis (the groom on the right) is a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. Nauseatingly prestigious, no?

The Case Against:
– Luis also wrote for the Harvard Crimson as an undergrad. His catalog consists heavily of Glee recaps.

Tarak Patel and Joseph Swimmer
The Case:
– The lawyer here is Joseph, the groom on the right. He was magna at Tufts, has a JD from Stanford, and is starting a new job in fund-raising at San Francisco’s Center for Youth Wellness.
– Tarak, his new husband, has an undergrad degree from the University of Central Florida and an MBA from Florida State. He works at a commercial real estate firm.
– Joseph is of Cherokee descent, which means both grooms are Indian. (That’s offensive! But don’t look at us — they joke about it themselves in their write-up.)

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The Case Against:
– “Mr. Swimmer’s first marriage ended in divorce.” Whenever this appears in a same-sex wedding announcement, we’re consumed with obnoxious curiosity: Was the first marriage to a man or a woman? It’s none of our business — not that any of this stuff is — but admit it: you wonder, too.

Emily Fabre and Robert Gomez

The Case:
– This bespectacled pair was married by former SDNY judge Barbara S. Jones, for whom the groom clerked.
– Emily was magna at Penn and has a JD, cum laude, from the University of Michigan. She’s beginning a clerkship at the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
– Robert has an undergraduate degree from UCLA and a JD from Yale. He’s an associate at Willkie Farr.

The Case Against:
– After two decades as a prosecutor and 16 years on the bench, Judge Jones left public service in 2013 for a partnership at Zuckerman Spaeder. “I’ve always been awed by the power and responsibility that comes with being a judge and don’t expect to have that ever again,” she said when she announced the move. “What I do expect to have is giant piles of money,” she did not add.

The Verdict:
Will some of the shine come off Team Cuddihy-Urbina when they emerge from their Harvard cocoon? Maybe, but who cares? They’ll still have four Harvard degrees, and that makes them our hands-down winners. Congratulations to them and to all our newlywed couples.

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Honorable Mention:
Sarah Molinoff and Scott Rosenthal (2, NYU, Wilmer, Paul Weiss)
Xing-Yin Ni and Arthur Shum (2, Harvard, Boston College)
Lauren Springer and Daniel Rosen (Harvard, Weil)
Elizabeth Hendee and James Canner (UPenn, Weil)
Amita Gopinath and Vladislav Vainberg (2, Columbia, Penn, Wachtell)
Alice Johnson and Mark Thomson (Harvard)

The Rest:
Madelyn Morris and Daniel Goldberg (Cardozo, Kirkland)
Molly O’Donnell and Hao Meng (Cardozo)
Ashley Nummer and Andrew Ladner (GW, Gibson Dunn)
Shana Pettinato and Michael Ricchiuto (2, NYLS)
Sarina Khiatani and Vishaal Bhuyan (St. Thomas)
Kathryn Newman and David Reid III (2, Fordham, Temple)
Melanie Sylvan and Joshua Sachs (Brooklyn)

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