Legislative Career
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.
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.
As 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., 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."
Read more about this topic: Bill Lockyer
Famous quotes containing the words legislative and/or career:
“The dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people, and every blessing of society, depend so much upon an upright and skilful administration of justice, that the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, as both should be checks upon that.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)