Sir Richard Ian Barker KC (17 March 1934 – 11 November 2022) was a New Zealand jurist.

[1] His parents were Kate Dorothy (née Humphrys) and Archibald Henry Barker.

At the High Court he played a key role in the introduction of judicial case management, a radical step for a common law jurisdiction at that time.

He sat as a judge in appeal courts in Fiji, the Pitcairn Islands (which is held in Auckland), Samoa, Vanuatu, and Kiribati.

[2] From the 1980s, Barker was a visiting fellow and lecturer at law schools in Australia, Canada, and England (including Wolfson College, Cambridge).

In 2000 he was appointed the first New Zealand member of the World Intellectual Property Organization domain dispute panel.

From 2000 to 2002 Barker was president of Arbitrators' & Mediators' Institute of New Zealand and from 2003 to 2019 chaired the Sir George Elliot Charitable Trust.

[1] In retirement he helped provide remedial reading tuition to students at Otahuhu College.