As we expected, celebrity professors Cass Sunstein and Samatha Power were the winners of last week's July Couple of the Month voting, running away with over 60 percent of the vote. Congratulations to this nerdy-hot duo!

This week's set of contestants might be the strongest we've seen this season. Their write-ups feature five Harvard degrees, a Rhodes, and one of Biglaw's most exalted surnames. Here are the names of the newlyweds:

1. Geneviève Treuille and Daniel Wachtell

2. Melissa Langsam and Todd Braunstein

3. Amanda Schwoerke and Stephen Sachs

Read more about these couples -- and see their pictures -- after the jump.

The theme of yesterday's LEWW was the hotness disparity between three glowing brides and their very lucky grooms. Today we're delighted to report that the wedding gods stepped it up with our most recent batch of newlyweds. They've brought us four grooms who are at least as attractive as their brides or co-grooms. (And needless to say, all six of our newlyweds have the shiny credentials that you've come to expect from the Legal Eagle Wedding Watch.)

On to the finalists! Here they are:

1. Joanna Schwab and Nathan Pusey

2. Joseph Loy and Michael Kavey

3. Zoe Palitz and Brian Goldman

Click on the link below to find out more about these couples.

As some of you have noticed, we tend not to remark negatively on the innate physical attributes of our Legal Eagle contestants. There are several reasons for our reticence, but the most basic one is simply this: LEWW believes that prestige is beautiful. LEWW believes that every bride can look gorgeous on her special day if she has the right law degree. LEWW believes that a JD from HLS is like a great bra; it looks flimsy and has a jaw-dropping price tag, but it will support you and make you look better than you deserve.

Having made much of our reluctance to comment disparagingly about our subjects' appearance, we'll promptly depart from our own custom and announce that this is Hotness Disparity Week on LEWW. All of our grooms are decent-looking but undeniably average Joes, and we submit to you that all of them have married up.

See if you agree with us. Here are the couples:

1. Uma Amuluru and John Theis

2. Dena Fayad and David Guggenheim

3. Courtney Gregoire and Scott Lindsay

Click on the link below to read about these couples.

Good news for Legal Eagle Wedding Watchers: LEWW will be returning to a more frequent and timely posting schedule! Beginning next week, we'll once again feature our gold standard of three fabulous couples per week to ogle and dissect.

We'll bring you more hot August weddings tomorrow and Friday, but for now, it's time for our readers to vote on a Couple of the Month for July. Although their write-up wasn't in the NYT and therefore didn't run in our normal LEWW column, we're including celebrity professors Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein, whose union merited LEWW bonus coverage last month (as well as a shout-out in the Washington Post's Reliable Source column).

For more information on these newlyweds, click on the link below. When you're ready to vote, here's the poll:

This installment of the wedding watch is a bit of a hodge-podge. We've got old people, Communism, Skadden, HLS, organized crime, a SCOTUS connection, and a midriff-baring bride. But the common thread, as always, is lawyers in love (though not necessarily with other lawyers; there's just one dual-JD pair in this group).

Here are this week's nominees:

1. Deborah Ellis and Hal Strelnick

2. Rachel Hershfang and Wesley Williams

3. Katherine Wagner-McCoy and Jacob Goldstein

4. Andrea Connor and Evan Hudson

More about these envy-inducing newlyweds, after the jump.

We interrupt the spirited smackdown of ATL Idol to bring you a couple of LEWW-related announcements. First, as expected, Team Ho-Glover scored a decisive win in June's Couple of the Month voting. LEWW salutes this glorious SCOTUS - WGWAG - Friend-of-Lat juggernaut!

In other news, two notable grooms didn't make our list of finalists this week. The first is Lee Bollinger, son of current Columbia University president (and former University of Michigan president) Lee Bollinger. And the second is Paul Lieberstein, who looks a lot like that guy who plays Toby in The Office. Because he is that guy.

On to this week's contestants:

1. Sue-Yun Ahn and Charles Kitcher

2. Jennifer Hare and Jaron Shipp

3. Gena Hatcher and David Lenzi

4. Athena Theodoro and Daniel Adamson

Click on the link below to read more about these impressive legal matches.

It's nearly August, and we still haven't crowned ATL's Legal Eagle Couple of the Month for June. Time to vote!

As we did last month, we've added a third couple to round out the choices. We thought that Mary Fan and Dean Kawamoto were the month's strongest runners-up, so we've included them for your consideration. Last month, the "bonus couple" waltzed away with the title; let's see if Mary and Dean can pull off a similar upset.

If you're ready to vote, here's the poll. To read more about the couples, click on the link below.

Should summer associates get married? We don't mean at all (though it's an intriguing thought) -- just while they're summers. On the one hand, summers aren't doing much real work, and those fat paychecks will help contribute nicely to the honeymoon fund (unless you're already hitting your guests up for that). On the other hand, last-minute wedding preparations could interfere with all those social events. And do you really want to remind the firm that you might one day procreate?

We're pondering these questions because one of our three brides this week is currently a summer associate. We think it's a gutsy move, and we wish her the best of luck with her marriage and her offer. On to our three contestant couples:

1.) Cecilia Silver and Jason Lichter

2.) Amanda Sharp and Kristoffer Hinson

3.) Anne O'Hagen and John Karl

Read more about these couples, after the jump.

Back in May, we broke the news of the engagement of celebrity professors Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power. Both are Harvard-trained lawyers and high-profile advisers -- current in Sunstein's case, and former in Power's case (see Monstergate) -- to fellow HLS grad Barack Obama.

In the fall, Professor Sunstein will be teaching law at Harvard, where Professor Power teaches at the Kennedy School of Government. His relationship with Power reportedly played a major role in his decision to leave the University of Chicago, his longtime home in legal academia.

If you doubted our original report about the Power-Sunstein engagement, your doubts were misplaced. It's now official. From the Irish Independent:

The man who brought them together was unavoidably detained elsewhere. Barack Obama has the small matter of a US presidential campaign to fight.

[On Friday], a world away in rain-lashed Co Kerry, two of his friends tied the knot. The wind blew and the rain poured down but it could not spoil a very special Fourth of July for Samantha Power.

Obama's former adviser married Professor Cass Sunstein in Mary Immaculate Church, on the edge of the sea at Loher near Waterville, Co Kerry.

Irish-American academic and writer Samantha (38) arrived for her marriage to the 54-year-old law professor at the church in the parish of Caherdaniel, the home turf of 19th century politician, the Liberator Daniel O'Connell.

The couple met while working on the Obama presidential campaign.

The celebrated Sunstein and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Power are boldface names, and the person who brought them together is probably going to be the next President of the United States. But because their nuptials were not featured in the august pages of the New York Times -- we wonder why they didn't submit themselves (because they would have made the cut if they had) -- Power and Sunstein are not eligible for consideration in the next installment of Legal Eagle Wedding Watch.

But we obviously could not let their wedding go unremarked. Hence this special report, which you can think of as "LEWW Supp."

More details, after the jump.

As promised, we're back with our second installment of LEWW this week. We think you'll agree that this one features some of our finest contestants of the season. A SCOTUS clerkship (finally!), a Rhodes, more YLS grads -- enjoy this special Independence Day edition of the Legal Eagle Wedding Watch!

Here are the names:

1. Stephanie Denton and Zeno Baucus

2. Mary Fan and Dean Kawamoto

3. Emma Terrell and Trevor Leitch

4. Courtenay Van Sciver and Peter Washkowitz

5. Maria Glover and Derek Ho

Click on the "continue reading" link below to see these couples' photos and sparkly credentials.

They work on the most significant -- and glamorous -- legal cases of our time. They get $250,000 signing bonuses when they leave the marble palace at One First Street for private practice. They dominate when it comes to Legal Eagle Wedding Watch.

But at the end of the day, Supreme Court clerks are just like us. Some of their storybook weddings end unhappily.

From Robert Ambrogi, over at Legal Blog Watch:

It is the dream of so many Biglaw lawyers: To simplify, to downsize, to forgo big bucks in favor of personal fulfillment. And it was the dream the former Washington, D.C., Biglaw partner had pursued -- at least until his plans were foiled by last week's Massachusetts Appeals Court opinion in the case, C.D.L. v. M.M.L.

The unidentified lawyer had it all, graduating from law school near the top of his class, clerkships with a federal circuit court and then the Supreme Court, a private practice in energy law with the D.C. office of a large Wall Street firm, average annual income of $700,000, a large house in Maryland and private schools for the kids.

Eventually the travel and stress got to him and he began to contemplate downsizing. He and his wife came up with a plan for him to leave his firm and seek an alternative career, but still earn sufficient income to keep their lifestyles comfortable.

Seems reasonable. But things didn't turn out quite as they expected.

Read more, below the fold.

It didn't make our final four. But this wedding announcement, featuring an heir to the great Swingline Stapler fortune, gives us an opportunity to note that there is -- who knew? -- more than one way to staple something.

We recently learned that you can rotate a plate on the bottom half of your stapler, thereby causing the hammer to press the staple out instead of in and "pinning" the document together temporarily. Minutes of fun, people!

Back to business. Here are this week's newlywed entrants:

1. Alyson Evans and James Beha II

2. Jennifer Brosnahan and Kevin McIntyre

3. Kristen Eichensehr and Richard Ré

4. Amanda Kosonen and David Schleicher

Read up on these fabulous contestants, after the jump.

A commenter recently noted that "[t]he LEWW posts are marked with a logo to make it easy to avoid them." Ouch! In fairness, we note that the same commenter also called us "one [of] the best, funniest, most well-written features on ATL" (thanks!). Whether the sight of the LEWW logo makes your heart sing or sink, the please note that the logo has changed to something a bit more festive.

In other business, we certainly made the right call when we decided to include an extra couple in May's Couple of the Month poll! The "write-in" candidates were your favorites by far, running away with over 60 percent of the vote.

Congratulations to Noraan Sadik and Stephen Haskins, ATL's Legal-Eagle Couple of the Month for May 2008!

We caught up on our wedding-watching backlog this weekend, so stay tuned, LEWW lovers. There's more coming this week, and it includes some of our readers' favorite acronyms.

Cheers!

Because we only had two LEWW winning couples for May, we're throwing this week's runners-up -- also very strong contenders -- into the mix for your consideration.

If you're ready to vote, here's the poll.

If you don't know who the heck these people are, click on the link below to read all about our fabulous finalists.

We're eagerly awaiting the end of the Supreme Court's 2007-2008 Term -- not because of all the sexy end-of-Term opinions, but because we're hoping the SCOTUS clerk nuptial action will pick up! It's been far too long since one of the Elect has graced this space. We haven't even seen a truly top-grade circuit clerkship in a while.

So finish up those sexy opinions, SCOTUS clerks, and then get to work penning your bragadocious NYT wedding announcements! Until then, here are this week's outstanding finalists:

1. Kimberly Wilson and Michael Portnoy

2. Noraan Sadik and Stephen Haskins

3. Maya Stowe and Daniel Silver

4. Alyssa Saunders and Eric Trager

5. Kristin Silverberg and Paul Lettow

Read all about these newlyweds, after the jump.

It has been a while since the last installment of Legal Eagle Wedding Watch. But fear not; the next LEWW will be appearing shortly, most likely tomorrow.

In the meantime, to tide over those of you with a hankering for lawyer wedding news, here is a photo essay about the wedding of my co-clerk, Ryan Bounds, and Bethany Ingwalson (pictured above). Ryan and I were law school classmates and clerked together for Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain (9th Cir.).

Both Bethany and Ryan are lawyers. The bride is senior counsel at the IRS, currently on detail to Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. She graduated from Miami University of Ohio, summa cum laude, and received a law degree from Georgetown, magna cum laude. The groom is senior counsel in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice. He graduated with distinction from Stanford and received a law degree from Yale. Congratulations and best wishes to the happy couple!

The picture album -- featuring appearances by leading conservative lawyers and judges, including our former boss -- can be accessed here. Enjoy!

P.S. I took these pictures myself. They should not (and would not) be confused with professional wedding photographs.

Wedding of Bethany Anne Ingwalson and Ryan Wesley Bounds [Picasa Web Album]

Congratulations to Keira Driansky and David Simon, chosen by ATL readers over Kristy Hong and Jonas Blank III as April's Legal Eagle Couple of the Month.

Now for the next set of entrants, and it's a crowded field. We think this week's column sets a record for total number of Ivy League JDs. Here's our latest crop of outstanding newlyweds:

1. Deborah Adler and Brian Sutherland

2. Rachel Hannaford and Justin Lerer

3. Zoe Segal-Reichlin and Daniel Garodnick

4. Alison Franklin and Shane Milam

Read up on their pedigrees and passions, after the jump.

Now that the wedding season is in full swing, it's time for a poll to crown a Legal Eagle Wedding Watch couple of the month. We have two outstanding entries for April:

1. Keira Driansky and David Simon

2. Kristy Hong and Jonas Blank III

You can read all about these newlyweds after the jump. But if you're ready to vote, here's the poll:

And don't forget, we're still soliciting ideas for a new LEWW logo. Send your contributions here.

Here is a juicy bit of gossip, about the complicated love lives of three leading legal / political thinkers. From a Harvard Law School alum who was a year ahead of celebrity professor Samantha Power (one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals):

Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power are engaged, but apparently it's all secret because Cass hasn't told [his former paramour] Martha Nussbaum yet.

Well, it's not a secret any more.

We reached out to both Professor Sunstein and Professor Power. Neither had any comment. If you happen to have more info, please email us.

The Sunstein-Power romance, as you may recall, blossomed when they were working for the Obama campaign. Now, of course, Senator Barack Obama is on the brink of securing the Democratic presidential nomination. If he wins the general election, expect both Sunstein and Power to land plum positions in the Obama administration.

How plum? Check out Garrett Graff's fantastic piece about possible Obama cabinet picks, in the latest issue of Washingtonian magazine. Graff identifies Power, "the Pulitzer-winning human-rights researcher and author," as a "wild card" on Obama's foreign policy team.

Emphasis on "wild." As Graff notes, Power "helped tutor Obama in foreign policy, but resigned after comments where she called Hillary Clinton a 'monster.'" Graff suggests that Power "might take a leading role on the National Security Council or at the State Department or Pentagon."

And what about Cass Sunstein? He's not mentioned in the Washingtonian article, which focuses on Cabinet positions. But we could easily see Professor Sunstein, an authority on administrative law, snagging a seat on the prestigiously glistening D.C. Circuit -- en route to a possible berth on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Expect these two to be the toast of the D.C. cocktail party circuit in 2009 -- or, in the event of a John McCain victory, the most coveted company at Harvard faculty dinner parties.

Who Might Be on an Obama Cabinet? [Washingtonian]

Earlier: The Real Reason Cass Sunstein's Going to Harvard? He's Got the Power
Wanna Be A Public Intellectual? Date Cass Sunstein!

Is anyone else sick of LEWW's logo? We've grown weary of the weird paper-doll figures holding hands -- they just don't say "celebration" to us.

So we're asking our readers to help us pick a new visual for Legal Eagle Wedding Watch. Some of you had gripes about ATL's new design -- here's your chance to put your stamp on a small corner of the site. Your submission can be a photo (an artistic detail shot from your own wedding, perhaps?) or a graphic of your own design. An allusion to the law would be a plus, but the most important thing is that the image convey the theme of impressive people getting married. (And, of course, it must not be an image that's copyrighted by someone else.)

Send us your entries (please e-mail them here and not to ATL's tips line). We'll pick our favorite and give you a big shout-out and heaps of gratitude for perking up this space.

And now, on to this week's finalists:

1.) Suzanne deVries and Adam Decker

2.) Kristy Hong, Jonas Blank III

3.) Elena Klau and Chad Silverman

4.) Natalie MacLean, Russell Leino

More about these candidates, after the jump.