Search of Reporter’s Home Tests Law With Roots in a Campus Paper’s Suit

The Stanford Daily lost a 1978 Supreme Court case over the search of its newsroom. But a bipartisan backlash prompted a federal law protecting journalists.

On a spring evening in 1971, police officers arrived at the newsroom of The Stanford Daily, a student newspaper. They were looking for photographs to identify protesters at a violent demonstration a few days before, and they had a search warrant.

The officers rummaged through file cabinets, desk drawers and waste baskets, some containing reporters’ notes of confidential communications.

The experience was intrusive, unsettling and an assault on journalistic independence, said Felicity Barringer, who was the paper’s editor in chief at the time. “It feels like being burglarized,” she said in an interview after a Washington Post reporter’s home was searched by the F.B.I. last week.