Happy New Year to everyone on our blog! We rang in 2026 at home in Virginia with the kids. It is always a double celebration for us. New Year’s Eve is also our wedding anniversary. Twenty-eight years ago, Leslie and I eloped in Old Town Alexandria. (We used my high school ring for the wedding ring.)
I will be giving the summary of our year on the blog later, but I wanted to wish everyone a safe and joyous New Year in 2026. This year has had tremendous highs and lows for us. We lost my father-in-law Marty and my mother Angela.
There is, however, a lingering legal dispute that continues to dog our celebrations. I count this anniversary as our 36th, while Leslie insists on counting this year as our 28th anniversary. (She takes a purely contractual approach that we must go by the marriage license while I insist on credit for eight years of our dating as constructive monogamy). We toasted our anniversary and the New Year (as we did 28 years ago and every year since) with a bottle of Schramsberg Crémant.
On New Year’s Day, we will follow tradition and make the Bowl of the Wife of Kit Carson Soup. My father, Jack Turley, first introduced the soup to our family in Chicago, which is a Mexican turkey soup. (He claimed that the spicy soup was the cure for any hangover). We have made the soup every year for over 50 years. We will also be serving my favorite Wasabi Bloody Marys to friends coming over to celebrate the New Year.
2026 promises to be a wild ride. This year will get off to a fast start with major Supreme Court cases in the works as well as the run-up to the critical midterm elections.
We are roughly a month away from the release of my new book on February 3rd for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution has been years in the making and I am excited to see it in print.
I look forward to sharing these developments and stories with everyone on this blog. Despite the trolls, we have a unique community here, and I will be toasting to all of you at midnight.
Happy New Year to everyone on our blog.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
Trolls rule!
Long live the trolls!
Happy New Year Professor Turley!
Happy New Year Professor Turley and your entire family! My hope and prayer is that 2026 will be a blessed year for you, our nation, and We The People! God bless you and the United States of America!
Totally agree! A great year for one and all!
Thank you and happy new year, Professor Turley. I enjoy your legal analysis and the voices here that make this a great place to deliberate and discuss.
2026 is going to be “interesting times”
Happy New Year to you and your family. Thank you for all your thoughts. Rarely is such intelligence and honesty shared any more.
“I count this anniversary as our 36th, while Leslie insists on counting this year as our 28th anniversary.”
Do you have a properly notarized “cohabitation agreement” covering those 8 years? If not, she wins; you lose. Virginia does not recognize common law marriage.
“(. . . I insist on credit for eight years of our dating as constructive monogamy).” Pretty sure that “constructive monogamy” is not a thing.
P.S. Happy New Year
Happy New Year to you and your family as well! May it be a good, productive one. Also, happy anniversary to you and your wife! Telling your story was comical yet loving. God bless, and look forward to your wisdom!
Despite the trolls, we have a unique community here . . .
I just want to thank you for acknowledging there are trolls here. Although I have ideas on how to reduce their presence, this is not the time for that. But it is good to know you are aware of the problem.
I agree.
Something needs to be done about those pesky trolls.
They seem to think that they have the same right to free speech as the rest of us MAGA true believers.
Where on earth do they get the idea that they have the same right to free speech as the rest of us true believers ???
It really is astonishing that the trolls actually think they have any rights at all !!!!
I’m pretty sure the Constitution explicitly states that trolls have no right to free speech.
That is correct.
I believe Madison and Jefferson had extensive discussions about whether to grant any rights at all to trolls.
Even Shakespeare had his Trolls:
“To Troll or not to Troll … That is the Question” -Prince Hamlet’s Troll
Speech: “To be, or not to be, that is the question”
By William Shakespeare
(from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet)
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
C’mon everyone! Give it up for me! This is the longest discussion I’ve posted here between me and myself playing like-minded Democrats!
It’s a personal best and you can’t even put your hands together to give me a courtesy round of applause?
Bravi!
Happy New Year!!!
Happy New Year! We live in Maryland but celebrated new year’s in Longyearbyen Svalbard Norway…the northern most city in the arctic with 2500 inhabitants and modern conveniences!
I am not sure if it matters to anyone who actually permanently lives in such northern places, but the northernmost permanently occupied community closest to the geographic North Pole, is Alert, Canada, in that country’s Northwest Territories. Having been a happy camper who was part of a NATO exercise involving Canada’s Canadian Rangers who visited Alert, I didn’t see anything that would make me want to voluntarily return there for anything that could remotely be called “tourism”.
Denmark’s Furry Arctic Patrol, still patrolling their borders within the Arctic camping in the Arctic while travelling by dogsled throughout the winter must take the prize for being one of the most miserable jobs on the earth; it would make living in permanent insulated housing with electrical power provided by generators in places like Alert look like sheer luxury.
Canada can also lay claim to being the country where the magnetic north pole is located within – a point well south of the geographic north pole.
I would like the wasabi bloody mary recipe. Happy new year!
That sounds very tasty!
Happy New Year professor and happy anniversary to you and the Mrs.!
🎉🍾 HAPPY NEW YEAR 🎈🎊
and So-long New York, New York
(Mayor Zohran Mamdani take it away !!!!! )
– Goodbye New York – Hello Miami ! –
It promises to be a very Great Year.
– The best is yet to come! –
If you watch the New Year’s eve scene in godfather 2 where everybody’s rich and partying down and then the communist revolution happens and they RUN, kind of eerily prescient of what just happened to NYC.
Jonathan – All the best to you and your family! Thank you for your wonderful articles! I look forward to receiving them. Happy New Year!
Happy New Year and anniversary!