There’s nothing scary about this Halloween edition of the Legal Eagle Wedding Watch. Our featured newlyweds include two Skadden associates, a SCOTUS clerk, and a famous heiress / model / entrepreneur.

Here are our fabulous finalist couples:

1. Limor Robinson and Jordan Mann

2. Heather Elliott and Stuart Rachels

3. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner

Marvel at the accomplishments of these couples, after the jump.

Congratulations to Caroline Nyenke and LaRue Robinson, selected by ATL readers as our August Couple of the Month in a close race. Things were a bit more lopsided in our September Couple of the Month poll, as SCOTUS clerks and lovebirds Karen Dunn and Brian Netter took the crown with 40 percent of the vote. Both couples will compete for Couple of the Year honors in a few months.

Now, this week’s contestants:

1. Molly Rusten and Peter Rosen

2. Xixi Yin and Edward Amley Jr.

3. Simrin Parmar and John Bennett

Check out these newlyweds’ pictures and bios, after the jump.

If you were hoping for the AutoAdmit lawsuit to result in courtroom drama, with Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey breaking down in tears on the stand, then we’re sorry to disappoint you. The case has ended, somewhat anticlimactically.

Last week, the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their case against the remaining defendants. From the Hartford Courant:

Two former Yale University law school students have quietly settled a high-profile lawsuit they brought against about two dozen anonymous authors who the students said defamed and threatened them by posting malicious falsehoods on an Internet message board.

Perhaps plaintiff Brittan Heller felt ready to put down her sword, now that she’s happily married. But note that the dismissal is without prejudice (so check yo self, Pauliewalnuts).

What did the plaintiffs get out of filing their lawsuit?

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned the Princeton Review law school rankings. The rankings are based on law student surveys, which may explain why the rankings bear little relationship to reality.

But Paul Caron of Tax Prof Blog has looked at Princeton Review’s underlying data, and he’s come up with some interesting info about how much law students are studying.

Here are the top ten schools in terms of study hours per day:

Villanova law students, you guys are lying. You cannot possibly average 7.5 hours of study a day unless you are (a) skipping class or (b) really dumb.

After the jump, let’s take a look at the schools that report the least amount of study time.

Meet Stewart Rhodes. He graduated in 2004 from Yale Law School, where his paper, “Solving the Puzzle of Enemy Combatant Status,” won a prize for the best paper on the Bill of Rights. Before entering the law, he served as a U.S. Army paratrooper.

What’s Rhodes up to now? Many military men turned lawyers troop off to large law firms, where the discipline and diligence cultivated in the armed forces help them succeed. Others join the JAG Corps or work for defense contractors.

But Rhodes, who was a non-traditional student at YLS, has taken a non-traditional career path since graduating.

Supreme Court clerks continue to flood the NYT wedding pages this month, creating grim LEWW odds for mere-mortal Cornell grads and Skadden associates. Like Troy playing Florida or North Texas playing Alabama, these folks are welcome to suit up, but the only question is how bad their whuppin’ is going to hurt.

Here are your three finalist couples for the week:

1. Rebecca Mancuso and Andrew Brunswick

2. Erin Gustafson and David Curtiss

3. Kathleen Devine and David Newman

Evaluate these newlyweds, after the jump.

LEWW’s memory isn’t what it once was, but we can’t recall a stronger week in legal nuptials than this one. All six of our featured newlyweds are truly impressive, and a few are even interesting! And not to give anything away, but if you love SCOTUS clerks (and oh, we do!) prepare to curl your toes in ecstasy.

Here are our finalists:

1. Lee Bickley and Martin Carr

2. Betsy Anderson and David Gottlieb

3. Karen Dunn and Brian Netter

Join us in evaluating these couples, after the jump.

This week’s Vows column is a jaw-dropper. Twelve-year-old girl has crush on doorman (“‘He looked like the guy from Tiger Beat,’ she recalled”), stalks doorman for over a decade, and finally marries him. And he’s still the doorman!

Also, don’t miss this Skadden associate’s unorthodox proposal: He had his girlfriend served with a “complaint” while he was in the men’s room.

On to this week’s couples:

1. Florence Davis and Anthony Gooch

2. Alexandra Seggerman and Stephen Poellot

3. Marin Levy and Joseph Blocher Jr.

Read all about this week’s featured newlyweds, after the jump.

LEWW is fascinated by ATL’s Douchiest Law School contest. Official results haven’t been announced yet, but based on our preliminary read, Yale seems to have notched a decisive first-round victory over the University of Texas, and it looks like Harvard has trounced UCLA. Stanford Law School, however, appears to have been decisively out-douched by lowly Georgetown. Conclusion: The relationship between douchiness and prestige is not linear.

This week’s weddings feature two YLS grads and two SLS grads, so these lawyer newlyweds are undeniably prestigious. But are they also representative of their respective institutions’ reputations for d-baggery? We’ll let you make the call.

Here are the couples:

1. Wendy Katz and Matthew Waxman

2. Megan Wall-Wolff and Joshua Younger

3. Julia Kripke and Matthew Kellogg

Read all about these couples and vote for your favorite, after the jump.

LEWW loves summertime. We’re shining the spotlight on four law school graduates this week (well, three and an almost-graduate), and all four are from Yale or Harvard. All that prestige is perfect for a steamy Friday afternoon in August (and if it’s too elitist for you, here’s a cool lesbian-lawyer wedding).

Even better: One of our contestants is a plaintiff in a high-profile lawsuit involving anonymous internet comments! (So comment with care on this post.)

LEWW will be on vacation next week, but we’ll have June/July Couple of the Month polls for you. Regular weekly posting will resume with a double issue on Friday, August 28.

Here are this week’s three finalist couples:

1. Adina Yoffie and Matthew Feigin

2. Brittan Heller and Nathaniel Gleicher

3. Julie Cohen and Jared Strumwasser

Click on the link below for pictures and details on these fabulously credentialed newlyweds.

It is not unusual for some top firms to decline to interview at Yale Law School. The school is so small, and quite frankly some firms know that they are not going to attract Yale talent.

That said, in this market some firms are unsure about what to do with fall recruiting. Is pulling out of Yale this year an indication of a firm’s larger decision to scale back its 2010 summer program? A tipster has done some legwork for Above the Law readers:

Yalies got a fall interview program pep-talk/preparation video yesterday. According to the CDO, the firms participating plan to have “robust summer programs” but “smaller” than in the past. Nothing too surprising….

Interesting to you guys will be the top firms who are NOT participating in the fall interview program at Yale. I went through Vault up to 50. If firms with New York offices won’t send people on an hour-and-a-half train ride to New Haven, even just for show, they must really be hurting.

Check after the jump for the list of Vault 50 law firms that won’t be doing OCI at Yale.

With the Fourth of July falling on a Saturday this year, it pains us to contemplate all the tacky red-white-and-blue themed weddings that will be taking place tomorrow in VFW halls across this great nation. Please, people: A little bunting goes a long way. And it should never go on the bridesmaids.

But we’ll tackle the Independence Day weddings next week. Today, we’ve got the last batch of June weddings. Here are the finalists:

1. Heidi Lee and Steven Hwang

2. Ahsaki Benion and Richard Habersham II

3. Kristin Campbell and Robert Samuelson

Read more about these newlyweds, after the jump.

We told you so — over a week ago. This past weekend, at the ACS National Convention, we received further confirmation from Yale Law School sources. So today’s announcement of Professor Robert Post as the new dean of YLS comes as no surprise.

The official announcement from Yale president Richard Levin, plus one student’s take on the Post pick, after the jump.

Harvard Law School just announced its new dean, Martha Minow. Minow replaces Elena Kagan, who left HLS to become Solicitor General.

Meanwhile, HLS’s rival to the south, Yale Law School, has a vacant deanship of its own, also courtesy of the Obama Administration. After being nominated to serve as the Legal Adviser of the State Department, Harold Hongju Koh stepped down as dean. Professor Kate Stith is now serving as acting dean.

We called Dean Koh’s departure months before it happened, and now we’ll hazard another prediction: his successor as dean will be Robert Post, currently the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale. From an ATL tipster:

I have it from a pretty reliable source that the new YLS dean is going to be Robert Post. It seems really bizarre and unexpected…. but I’m pretty sure it’s true.

We’re not sure if we’d call it “bizarre and unexpected,” but it would be surprising. The trend in academia is to award leadership posts — university presidencies, law school deanships — to women and/or minorities. See, e.g., Elena Kagan, Martha Minow, and Drew Faust, at Harvard.

Several of the candidates floated for the YLS deanship — including Acting Dean Kate Stith, Professor Reva Siegel, and Professor Heather Gerken — would have advanced the goal of “diversity.” Robert Post is a white male, which doesn’t help when applying for promotion — especially in New Haven. If he were a firefighter, he’d be screwed.

Comments from more sources, who all agreed that Post will be picked, after the jump.

We were dying to write about this wedding announcement, featuring a slutty Strawberry Shortcake costume (WTF?) and a wacky/tacky proposal story. But alas, commenters would have crucified us for elevating comedic potential over excellence.

So behold, this week’s finalists. They include five Harvard degrees, five Yale degrees, and OMGOMGOMG the best Article III officiant ever. Enjoy.

1. Jessica Richman and Matthew Smith

2. Jessica Hertz and Christopher Angell

3. Ashley Lynn and Kenneth Leonczyk Jr.

The scoop on these legal-eagle weddings, after the jump.

Before we discuss this week’s finalists, here’s a peek at some of the weddings we can’t feature due to space constraints: a former Kirkland & Ellis partner marrying the youngest-looking 62-year-old we’ve ever seen, the creator of the Anonymous Lawyer blog marrying an anonymous doctor, and a Rhodes Scholar marrying an ordinary person.

The fact these couples couldn’t make the cut should tell you a little something about the quality of the field as we near the summit of the wedding season. Here are the three lucky couples who’ve reached the finals this week:

1. Kate Adamick and Kay Diaz

2. Sabrina Charles and Jamie Dycus

3. Jessica Chilson and Franklin Reece

Read more about these newlyweds, after the jump.

About a decade ago, Harvard Law School hired — and paid a lot of money to — McKinsey & Co., the celebrated consulting firm, to offer suggestions on how to improve HLS. The hope was that, armed with McKinsey’s wisdom, Harvard would overtake Yale Law School in the influential U.S. News and World Report law school rankings.

But did HLS need to hire consultants to solve this problem? One simple solution would surely have put Harvard over the top: cut the size of its entering class by a third or a half, while leaving everything else — the size and quality of the faculty, the number of books in the library, the waterless urinals in Harkness — unchanged.

Okay, maybe consultants would be needed, to figure out how to replace the lost tuition dollars. But the overall point remains: when it comes to law school class size, small is beautiful. Fewer students means more resources per student. It’s not surprising that so many of the top law schools in the country — e.g. Yale, Stanford, Chicago — have entering classes under 200 students a year.

Oh wait — maybe not Yale. From an email just issued to the YLS community:

We write with an update concerning changes in the size of the incoming YLS Class of 2012, mentioned by Dean Koh in his State of the School address this past February. While it is difficult to precisely project the size of the class, according to the administration, they anticipate an increased JD class size of up to 25 additional students in the incoming class. This will most likely result in traditional small group sizes that range between 16-18 students in each group. The size of the graduate program is predicted to be in line with the class sizes over the last few years. As always, please contact us with any questions you may have regarding this issue at [redacted].

An increase of this size is significant for Yale. A typical YLS entering class has about 175 students, so an additional 25 students results in a class that’s about 15 percent larger.

What might this mean for Yale? More after the jump.

Yesterday we learned the identities of Justice Clarence Thomas’s outstanding law clerks for October Term 2009. With the very interesting exception of Justice David Souter — who appears not to have hired yet, but email us if we’re wrong — the justices are done hiring for OT 2009.

Based on the SCOTUS clerk roster thus far, here are the top five feeder schools:

1. Harvard: 8
1. Yale: 8
3. UVA: 4
4. Georgetown: 2
4. Michigan: 2

And here are the top five eight feeder judges (note the four-way tie for fifth):

1. J. Harvie Wilkinson (4th Cir.): 4
2. D. Ginsburg (D.C. Cir.): 3
2. O’Scannlain (9th Cir.): 3
2. Sutton (6th Cir.): 3
5. Garland (D.C. Cir.): 2
5. Kavanaugh (D.C. Cir.): 2
5. Kozinski (9th Cir.): 2
5. Reinhardt (9th Cir.): 2

Check out the full lists, for OT 2009 and OT 2010, after the jump.

Lawyers and poker go together like rare steak and red wine. You need many of the same logical skills, interspersed with an ability to take managed risks. With the legal job market looking like a busted straight that you shouldn’t have chased in the first place, maybe it’s time for a different game?

Vanessa Selbst, a 1L at Yale Law School, certainly isn’t relying on a recovery in the legal market for future earnings. The World Series of Poker player was profiled in the Hartford Courant, yesterday:

Although she doesn’t carry a deck of cards with her at all times, Selbst is almost always thinking about gaming, whether she’s home, on the road or in a classroom at Yale law school, where she started last fall. It’s a mental discipline that has taken her from the cafeteria of her New Jersey high school, where she played pick-up games, to the high-roller suites at Foxwood Resort Casino and beyond, helping her become the first woman to win a bracelet in an open event at last June’s 39th annual World Series of Poker (WSOP) and earn nearly $800,000 in tournament winnings in the four years she’s played professionally.

Well, that will pay for law school.

The stereotypical lawyer/poker player is a tight player who takes minimal risks. They tread water and don’t chase and take you down when you make your set on the river while they’ve been slow playing their boat all along.

But Vanessa doesn’t play that way at all.

After the jump, never bluff and bluffer.

Last week, we told you about the surprisingly strong attack against former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh in the New York Post. Dahlia Lithwick of Slate also tried to debunk some of the attacks leveled at Obama’s pick to serve as the Legal Adviser of the State Department.

Is defending Koh the new liberal cause célèbre? Hardly. The latest group to stand up to the right-wing spinning of Koh’s record is a group of Yale Law School conservatives. In a statement given to Above the Law, a group of conservative students and Federalist Society members had this to say about their former Dean:

He is also an honorable man and eminently qualified to serve. He is a widely respected lawyer and academic who has thought deeply about international law and served with distinction in both Republican and Democratic administrations. He has a passion for public service that he passes on to students of all political views. Dean Koh is one of the brightest legal minds of his generation, a credit to the profession we look forward to joining, and an able and effective public servant.

It’s unlikely that those trying to tear down Koh care about what a bunch of law students think. But the kids are coming out swinging:

As conservatives, we do ourselves no favors when we adopt a shrill tone or make dishonest arguments against such people. For instance, the claim that Dean Koh would apply Sharia law in U.S. courts is simply absurd. While we were not present when he allegedly spoke on the subject, we are thoroughly acquainted with his views on transnationalism and find it impossible to believe that he would say such a thing.

We’ve heard from Yale students that disagree with Koh’s views, and even with the way he ran the law school. But people don’t seem to think that the man is crazy or a danger to American sovereignty. Maybe in some small way these students are helping to tamp down the rhetoric over this particular nominee.

Read the full statement after the jump.