Rachel Williams Dempsey and Bryn Anderson Williams were married Sept. 29 at the General’s Residence, an events space in the Fort Mason Center in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is in the San Francisco Bay Area. Melvin Fujikawa, a Universal Life minister and an uncle of the groom, officiated.
The couple met at Yale, from which they both received law degrees.
Ms. Dempsey, 31, is an associate at the San Francisco office in the civil rights and wage-and-hour class actions practice at Outten & Golden, an employment law firm based in New York.
She is the daughter of Joan C. Williams and James X. Dempsey of San Francisco. The bride’s father is the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. The bride’s mother is a law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She is also an author, most recently of “White Working Class” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017). She and the bride also wrote “What Works for Women at Work,” an advice book for professional women (New York University Press, 2014).
Dr. Williams, 36, is a litigation associate at the San Francisco law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and received an associate degree from Santa Rosa Junior College in California. He received a Ph.D. in cultural and social anthropology from Stanford.
He is the son of Connie Hamner Williams and Rod Williams of Petaluma, Calif. The groom’s mother retired as the teacher librarian from Petaluma High School, and is currently the history room librarian at the Petaluma branch of the Sonoma County Library. She is a member of the California State Library Services Advisory Board, to which she was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2014. The groom’s father, who is retired, was a freelance first camera assistant based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The couple, both avid San Francisco Giants baseball fans, got to know each other in October 2012 while they and other law students hung out almost daily to watch the team’s postseason run at a bar that was just off the Yale campus. On the day the Giants won the World Series the owner of the bar asked Ms. Dempsey what was going on between her and Dr. Williams. When she said nothing, he told her he saw that there was something there. Two months later the couple began dating, after running into each other at another bar.
