Shaina Roet Watrous and Joseph Walzer Barrett were married Feb. 2 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Justice Elena Kagan of the Supreme Court, a friend of the groom’s family, officiated.
The couple met at Princeton, from which they each graduated.
Ms. Watrous, 28, is a third-year law student at N.Y.U. In September, she is to begin a staff attorney fellowship at the Center for Appellate Litigation, a nonprofit organization that does appellate public defense and post conviction for indigent defendants in Manhattan and the Bronx.
She is the daughter of Ilene Shunfenthal Watrous and Donald A. Watrous of Princeton Junction, N.J. The bride’s mother is a physical therapist in private practice there. Her father is a systems administrator in the computer science department at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J.
Mr. Barrett, 27, is a planner at the Center for Court Innovation, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan that works to create a more effective and humane justice system. He focuses on new projects designed to provide alternatives to prosecution and incarceration in the city’s criminal justice system. He received a master’s degree in economic and social history from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar.
He is the son of Sarah E. Walzer and John Q. Barrett of Manhattan. The groom’s mother is the chief executive of the Parent-Child Home Program, a national early childhood literacy and school-readiness organization in Mineola, N.Y. She is on the board of the Princeton-based Petey Greene Program, which trains college students in tutoring people in prisons. His father is a professor of law at St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens. He is on the board of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, N.Y., which honors the legacy of the late associate Supreme Court justice.
The couple met in August 2009 on the first day of orientation of Princeton’s inaugural Bridge Year Program, through which they deferred their first year of undergraduate study to perform service work for nine months in Varanasi, India, where they began their relationship. She worked with an anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit group, and he with a literacy organization. Last August, during a visit to Varanasi, Mr. Barrett proposed as they sat along the Ganges River on Tulsi Ghat, just a few feet from where they had their first kiss.
