Neil H. Buchanan

Maya Angelou's famous warning is in serious danger of becoming stale: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." I risk adding to its overuse here because it so perfectly fits the big political story coming out of the State of Maine, where a man won the Democratic Party's nomination for US Senate in last month's statewide primary. His name is Graham Platner, and we should have believed him the first time.

Not having been brought up on soccer/football, I have only in the last twenty years or so learned anything at all about the World Cup. This year is the men's version, and even with my years of living outside of the US at least temporarily behind me, I have been paying fairly close attention to the tournament and everything around it. Not that I have actually watched any matches, mind you, given the stranglehold that Fox has on the broadcast rights, but I have certainly followed the results and surrounding news carefully enough to have formed three thoughts that I will share here to end the week.

How bad was the latest US Supreme Court term? Plenty bad, especially for anyone who cares at all about democracy or the rule of law. There were a few relatively pleasant surprises, but even those cases (as I will demonstrate shortly) can have worrisome lead linings hiding inside. But the truly awful decisions dominated the Court's output once again in 2025-26.

The US Supreme Court's just-completed term will go down as another bloodbath for American constitutionalism, for the rule of law, and even for basic decency. In yesterday's

Imagine a person who confidently and condescendingly tells you that he knows the answer to every question, except that he constantly gets

Eighteen years ago tomorrow, I published a Dorf on Law column announcing that I had become a vegan. Since that day, I have

Earlier this month, a divided panel of the Eleventh Circuit surprised many people -- most definitely including me -- with a ruling that Florida-based journalist J.C. Bruce hailed in

I should state up front that this column can be added to the "failing to remember history, doomed to repeat it" file. There is nothing new, of course, to the admonition that it is important to understand history. Although that is indeed an old point, it nonetheless needs to be repeated again and again, because too many people forget. And because history inescapably gets longer, while attempts to rewrite it -- especially in this era of pathological lying from the Oval Office -- are part of an ongoing disinformation campaign, the specifics matter.

"And in a Twitter post this week, Stevens criticized a video where El-Sayed criticized Aipac, with Stevens saying: 'Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.'"

At the end of " Now We'll See Whether the Democratic Establishment Truly Cares About Democracy (Part 1 of 2) " yesterday, I wrote that I would publish Part 2 of that column today.