"Stephen Roger Barnett" was an United States/American law professor and legal scholar who campaigned against the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 and the effects its antitrust exemptions had on newspaper consolidation. He also criticized the California Supreme Court for practices that hid information from the public.

Barnett was born on December 25, 1935, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. He grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, and attended Harvard University, from which he earned an undergraduate degree in 1957, having served as president of The Harvard Crimson. At Harvard Law School Barnett served as note editor of the Harvard Law Review; he was awarded his law degree in 1962. Following his graduation, he clerked for United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Judge Henry J. Friendly and then for Justice William J. Brennan of the Supreme Court of the United States. After a few years at the law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, he was hired by University of California, Berkeley School of Law/Berkeley Law School, where he spent almost the entirety of his career until his retirement in 2003. The exception was a stint as an assistant solicitor general in the United States Department of Justice, where Barnett argued cases before the Supreme Court from 1977 until 1979.

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The aggressiveness that was reflected in the Honolulu and San Francisco cases might not be continued today.

They're all solid candidates. They're very much in the traditional mold for California Supreme Court justices. They worked in a DA's office or the attorney general's office and then they climbed the judicial ladder. They've come up through the ranks and they don't bring much career diversity to the court.

None of them are as conservative as (Brown) is. Any of these people would move the court toward the center.

(In the past) the Department of Justice has been asked to take action and has declined to do so.

I think just the fact that there were so many individuals who had not adequately prepared in New Orleans, I think they took extra precautions, ... I think they planned better and took the storm more seriously. People both increased supplies and got out sooner.