Sunstein and Power, Harvard Power Couple, Tie the Knot

Move over, Larry and Elisa. Harvard’s got a new power couple.

Last Friday, incoming law professor Cass R. Sunstein ’75 and Kennedy School scholar Samantha Power were married in the seaside town of Waterville in Kerry, Ireland.

According to The Independent of Ireland, Power arrived at the evening ceremony in a champagne-colored Lexus covered in flowers. The 38-year-old author and foreign policy expert walked down the aisle in a cream, lace gown.

Reports surfaced online in May that the 54-year-old Sunstein, the nation’s most-cited legal scholar, and Power were engaged, and that the relationship played a role in Sunstein accepting Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan’s perennial offer to leave his longtime home at the University of Chicago Law School.

At the time, Chicago Law School Dean Saul Levmore told the Chicago Maroon, “I know—I don’t think, I know—that there are a couple of personal reasons for this decision.”

Kagan’s success at poaching professors from other schools left the Law School's student newspaper guessing at other things she might be able to steal for Harvard's gain: a ferris wheel, the John Hancock building, and a T-Rex skeleton.

Power, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2003 book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” made headlines this spring for describing Senator Hillary Clinton as a “monster.”

That comment forced Power, 38, to resign as foreign policy adviser from the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. It was while working for Obama that Power met Sunstein, an old friend and colleague of Obama from their days as faculty members at Chicago.

The marriage is Sunstein’s second. In recent years, he dated fellow Chicago faculty member, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. The two were featured as a “Power Couple” in Harvard alumni magazine 02138 last winter.

The couple’s joint stay in Cambridge could be short-lived. One Washington watcher described Power as a “wild card” possibility for a position in a potential Obama cabinet.

Around 150 guests attended a reception following the wedding, the Independent reported.