From an Institute for Free Speech symposium on the 50th anniversary of Buckley, which I've been cross-posting; this is by Roger Pilon, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, founding director emeritus of Cato's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, and founding publisher emeritus of the Cato Supreme Court Review:
Ten years ago, the Brooklyn Law School held a symposium to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Buckley v. Valeo, featuring Dean Nicholas W. Allard, the ACLU's legendary Ira Glasser, and the eponymous James L. Buckley himself, then a senior judge on the D.C. Circuit. Expressing his delight at being part of the commemoration, Judge Buckley noted that the decision had assured him "a measure of immortality." Immortality indeed! Here we are again, a decade later and half a century after Buckley was decided, and we're still talking about the case.
Let me open on a personal note. My wife Juliana and I have had the good fortune to know Judge Buckley—or Jim, as he insisted, and as I will do hereinafter to avoid confusing the man with the case. Especially after he moved back to Washington late in life, near us, we were often able to dine together. Long before that, however, as a Columbia University undergraduate, I was a volunteer in his improbable 1970 campaign to become New York's junior senator, running as a third-party candidate on the Conservative Party line.
But it was not until 1976, when Juliana and I were completing our doctorates at the University of Chicago, that we would first meet the senator at the storied Ford v. Reagan Republican National Convention, where we were alternate delegates pledged to Reagan. Two years earlier, you see, Jim had inserted in the Congressional Record Juliana's New Guard article, "Against Ideology," which drew from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. When we happened upon Jim at the convention and introduced ourselves, he responded, "Oh so you're Juliana Pilon!" Ever the epitome of modesty, that was Jim.
