19 Facts About Bill Lockyer

William Westwood Lockyer was born on May 8,1941 and is a retired American politician from California, who held elective office from 1973 to 2015, as State Treasurer of California, California Attorney General, and President Pro Tempore of the California State Senate.

In 1986, Bill Lockyer graduated with a JD from University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law.

Bill Lockyer, who lives in Hayward and Long Beach, California, was married in April 2003 to public service attorney Nadia Bill Lockyer, a former Alameda County Supervisor, with whom he has three children: a son born in 2004; and two twin sons, born in December 2015.

Bill Lockyer 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.

Bill 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.

Bill Lockyer became one of the two most prominent state Attorneys General in the nation, rivaled in media attention only by New York's Eliot Spitzer.

On other occasions, the positions Bill Lockyer defended matched his own, as when he defended California's 1996 legalization of medical marijuana against federal attacks by the Bush Administration.

Bill Lockyer found this particularly satisfying as he had come to strongly support "compassionate use" of Marijuana after living through his mother's and younger sister's deaths from leukemia.

In grappling with the sheer size and range of the state's law enforcement responsibilities, Bill Lockyer confronted, with varying success, several challenges that required his department to give new high-technology support to law enforcement agencies.

When Bill Lockyer took office, 100,000 of these blood samples were sitting in cold storage, still waiting to be analyzed and compared to DNA taken from crime scene evidence.

In June 2001, Bill Lockyer announced that with an expanded DNA Lab staff and new equipment, the backlog of unanalyzed blood samples had been entirely eliminated, leading to identification of suspects in homicide cases more than 15 years old.

The exposure of these hidden offenses began in August 2000 when Bill Lockyer created an Energy Task Force to launch the State's first investigation of alleged price gouging by power companies.

On September 20,2006, Bill Lockyer filed a lawsuit against what his office referred to as "the big six automakers" for their alleged contributions to global warming.

Two weeks later, at a UC Berkeley post-mortem conference on the election, Bill Lockyer made the surprise announcement that while he had voted against the recall, he had voted for Schwarzenegger, the first time he had ever voted for a Republican in a state election.

Bill Lockyer was elected to that office in November 2006.

Bill Lockyer was quoted as telling Democratic legislators that, "fair or not", angry voters blamed them for "12 years of flowing red ink".

Bill Lockyer suggested having a respected intermediary mediate between the Republican governor and the Democratic-controlled legislature.

In 2012, Bill Lockyer was seriously considered for chancellor of the California State University system, but the position went instead to a professional educational administrator.

Bill Lockyer is Of Counsel to the Boston-based international law firm, Brown Rudnick, advising clients in the firm's Orange County office on government law and strategies.