The following year, he received a Teaching Credential from CSU in Hayward, then worked for his father's roofing company and as a fork-lift driver at Ward's before getting his first job with the Legislature on the staff of Assemblyman Robert W. Crown.

Lockyer first won a State Assembly seat in a Special Election of September 4, 1973, following the accidental death of his political mentor, Bay Area Assemblyman Robert W. Crown.

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.

[9] 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[10] 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.

Proudly reproducing the original napkin on a poster titled "Tort-Mania 1987", Lockyer and Brown regarded the special interests compromise and conciliation they had arranged as a great legislative accomplishment.

The resulting establishment of a new CalWORKs (California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids) program had a major effect on the state budget, propelling difficult negotiations between the Democratic legislature and conservative Republican governor Pete Wilson.

The Department of Justice, of which he was “chief executive officer”, had some 5,000 employees, 1200 of whom were attorneys handling a caseload of 100,000 lawsuits – the equivalent, in the private sector of the seventh largest law firm in America.

This required Lockyer to radically restructure and reinvigorate his department with high-tech efficiencies and policy innovations to modernize the relationship between the attorney general and the law enforcement community.

[16] At the same time, Lockyer steered the Justice Department to a new legal activism that reflected his liberal values in such areas of litigation and regulation as civil rights and anti-trust enforcement and consumer and environmental protection.

In 1996, the state legislature had passed California's version of "Megan's Law", which required authorities to make publicly available registration information provided to local police by former child molesters, rapists and others sex offenders after being released from custody.

The website faced initial complaints that, despite the State's efforts to prod local Police to provide accurate data,[20] some of the information was outdated; and that, as the ACLU contended, there were too few restrictions to protect the civil liberties of those who had already completed their sentences.

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

[26] After a Seattle company unveiled a new technology for "coding" individual bullets, Lockyer sponsored the first legislation in the country which would have required all handgun (but not rifle) ammunition sold in California to be engraved with a unique serial identification number.

[27][28] Of the many actions taken by Lockyer's staff against corporate fraud and malfeasance, the most prominent were related to the state's energy crisis that began in the summer of 2000, marked by rolling blackouts, brownouts and the billions of dollars in price hikes that appeared on consumers' electrical bills.

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

[30] The Wall Street Journal scoffed at million-dollar rewards offered by the Attorney General's office for information about illegal conduct by energy powers, dismissing the allegations as unsupported by clear evidence.

[31] But such probes eventually led to some five billion dollars in brokered settlements by Enron and a half dozen other corporations which admitted to "gaming" the State's deregulated energy system.

[33][34] Lockyer later apologized for the statement in a letter to the Los Angeles Times, saying, "My anger over the activities of energy barons doesn't come close to my lifelong outrage at the crime of rape.

[41] By a year into Schwarzenegger's governorship, Lockyer increasingly felt the Governor's performance was disheartening, marked by inexperience, lack of strong political conviction, and personal braggadocio.

In a 2005 interview, Lockyer criticized Schwarzenegger's leadership style as demonstrating an "arrogance of power" with the "odor of Austrian politics", alluding to the Austrian-born Governor's upbringing in a country with a "long history" of "elite...autocracy".

"[43] Lockyer changed his mind four months later, saying that while he felt strongly about the need to improve education and transportation, and to address "the growing disparity" between the state's rich and poor, he was unwilling "to spend the next 10 years of my life" in the daily "partisan fighting" that plagued governors of both parties.

As treasurer (and ex officio trustee of CalPERS and CalSTRS, the two largest public employee pension funds in the United States) Lockyer tried to use the influence of his office in the aid of various environmental causes.

"[55] Throughout the budget crisis, Lockyer warned that an impasse would increasingly raise the costs of short-and long-term state borrowing, ultimately as much as an additional $7.5 billion in interest over the next 30 years.

"[58][59][60] Two days later, on July 16, Lockyer stated, “I call on the Governor and Legislature to focus exclusively on what it takes to bring this year’s budget back in balance, honestly and immediately.

[63] Four days after Lockyer's remarks, the Governor and legislative leaders finally announced they had reached agreement on a complex budget plan which combined spending cuts with various accounting maneuvers.

It reflects confidence that the budget solution adopted by the governor and legislature gets us on the right track..."[64] When the Toyota corporation announced it would close the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont, California, after its long-time partner in the facility, General Motors, pulled out of the partnership, Lockyer appointed a blue-ribbon commission that publicized the adverse economic consequences of plant closure and the unemployment of several thousand workers, and pleaded with Toyota to reconsider.

But then Lockyer, working behind the scenes, helped arrange a new partnership at the NUMMI plant between Toyota and Tesla Motors, an electric car company, which he had assisted in the past through the Treasurer's "Green Wave" investment policies.

[66] Despite persistent rumors that Lockyer, who had earlier accumulated a $10 million political war chest, might be a "dark horse" possibility for governor in 2010,[67] he expressed no interest in mounting a campaign to succeed Schwarzenegger.

[68] In an article probing Schwarzenegger's political unpopularity in his final months in office, George Skelton, after quoting Lockyer's reflection on the fickle electorate ("Our state voters have very high expectations of what government can do.