- Lockyer began his political career as a School Board member of the San Leandro Unified School District, as chair of the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee, and California coordinator of Senator George McGovern's 1972 campaign for the Presidency.
- In his spare time, Lockyer attended law school classes in Sacramento and received a law degree from the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific.
- Lockyer first won a State Assembly seat in a Special Election of September 4, 1973, following the accidental death of the Bay Area Assemblyman Robert W. Crown who was his political mentor. He served in the Legislature for the next twenty-five years, more than half that time in the State Senate, where, in 1994, he was chosen by his peers to be President Pro Tem, the most powerful position of the upper legislative house.
- Lockyer, who lives in Hayward and Long Beach, California, was married in April 2003 to public service attorney Nadia Lockyer, a former Alameda County Supervisor, with whom he has three children, a twelve-year-old son, and two twin sons, born in December 2015. By an earlier marriage, he also has an adult daughter who is an attorney for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
- As a freshman legislator in 1974, Lockyer wrote the first legislation to provide state funding for emergency oil spill decontamination. During his legislative career, as a close ally of environmental pressure groups like the Sierra Club and the Planning and Conservation League,[6] he wrote other environmental laws, including the first state regulation of trucks hauling toxic substances on California roads and highways, which preceded federal policies adopted by the EPA.
- On September 10, 1987, while Lockyer chaired the State Senate Judiciary Committee, he and Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown met at Frank Fat's Restaurant in Sacramento with representatives of bitterly competing special interests - insurance companies, trial lawyers, doctors and manufacturers - to formalize their agreement to "the most sweeping changes in California's civil liability laws in decades". After many days of painstaking negotiations, these warring interests had accepted a compromise bill that included "a drastic restriction in product liability laws offset by fee increases for lawyers prosecuting medical malpractice cases. Doctors got promises that protections already in place against lawsuits would not be touched. Insurance companies won a reprieve from threatened regulations gaining momentum in the Legislature." This compromise had already been worked out; the dinner was meant to ratify a future "peace pact" among all the concerned parties to abide by the compromise. Lockyer, who had acted as mediator during the earlier negotiations, scribbled the terms of the "pact" on a restaurant cloth napkin, and so ended a political war. The compromise bill was then ramrodded through the Assembly and State Senate on the last night of that year's legislative session, and was signed into law by Republican Governor George Deukmejian.
- As legislator, Lockyer won close friends on both sides of the partisan aisle, including Jim Brulte, Republican Minority Leader of the State Senate, who would long remember Lockyer's skill at compromise and consensus-building.,[4] and Democratic Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown, who recalled that, by the time Lockyer left the Legislature in 1998, "Capitol insiders took his prolific effectiveness for granted.".
- Lockyer considered his greatest environmental achievement to be his 1987 bill to create a Bay Trail, which he envisioned as an eventual 500-mile-long hiking and cycling path, a continuous recreational corridor, with adjacent bayshore parks and protected natural habitats, that would entirely encircle San Francisco and San Pablo Bays. Requiring city, county and regional cooperation, the Bay Trail marked its 20th year in 2009 with 293 miles so far open to hikers, bicyclists, joggers and walkers. Though Lockyer was nominally honored as "father" of the Bay Trail, his name appears only on a footbridge in one East Bay section.
- Lockyer attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.A. in Political Science in 1965. His first job was as a public school history teacher. In 1986, Lockyer graduated with a J.D. from University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law. (He returned to the classroom in 2009 as a non-tenured college professor, teaching a yearly undergraduate course in American State Politics at the University of Southern California.
- In 1984, Lockyer sponsored the State's first "hate crimes" legislation which, as later amended, provided that "no person...shall by force or threat of force, willfully injure, intimidate, interfere with, oppress, or threaten any other person in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or laws of this state or by the Constitution or laws of the United States because of the other person's race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender, or sexual orientation, or because he or she perceives that the other person has one or more of those characteristics." Later, as Attorney General, Lockyer was responsible for coordinating enforcement of this statute by local law enforcement.
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