Richard Lamm

Richard Lamm Profile

Richard Lamm has been ahead of his time for most of his life. The politician, writer, and professor, has been outspoken since the 1980s on the need for government to reconceive how it meets public needs of growing demographics with shrinking resources. A definitive straight shooter, he pushes “conservative” and “liberal” politics aside to focus on what today’s voters and policy makers can do to leave younger generations with the best world possible.

As a first year legislator, Lamm drafted and succeeded in passing the nation’s first liberalized abortion law. He was an early leader of the environmental movement. Reacting to the high cost of campaigning, he walked the state in his campaign for governor of Colorado. Lamm was elected to the position three terms, becoming the longest-serving governor in Colorado’s history at that time.

He is currently the Director of the Center for Public Policy & Contemporary Issues at the University of Denver.

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  • Richard D. Lamm is Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver, and the former three-term Governor of Colorado. (1975-1987) He is both a lawyer (Berkeley, 1961) and a Certified Public Accountant. He joined the faculty of the University of Denver in 1969 and has, except for his years as Governor, been associated with the University ever since.

  Lamm has appeared on virtually every national news program, including Buchanan & Press, Larry King Live, Inside Politics, Today, Meet the Press, Good Morning America, Lehrer NewsHour, and Face the Nation. His editorials have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, as well as in a number of academic and medical journals. While Governor, Lamm wrote or co-authored six books: A California Conspiracy, with Arnold Grossman (St. Martin′s Press, 1988); Megatraumas: America in the Year 2000 (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America, with Gary Imhoff (Dutton and Company, 1985), 1988, with Arnie Grossman (St. Martin′s Press, 1985), Pioneers & Politicians, with Duane A. Smith (Pruett Publishing Company, 1984) and The Angry West, with Michael McCarthy (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982). Since then, he has authored several other titles, including Two Wands, One Nation: An Essay on Race and Community in America (2006) and Condition Critical: A New Moral Vision for Health Care (2007).

  Lamm has always been in the forefront of political change. As a first year legislator, he drafted and succeeded in passing the nation′s first liberalized abortion law. He was an early leader of the environmental movement, and was President of the First National Conference on Population and The Environment. Reacting to the high cost of campaigning, he walked the state in his campaign for Governor of Colorado. Lamm was elected to three terms as Colorado′s top elected official, and in serving as Governor from January 1975 and retiring in January 1987, he was the longest-serving Governor in Colorado′s history to that date.

  Richard Lamm is one of a new breed of policy analysts who argues that the challenge our age is to meet new public needs with ever more limited resources. Public policy, he maintains, “cannot count on historic revenue growth and, thus, cannot chase geometric curves of public spending.” Lamm moves beyond traditional liberalism and conservatism to urge that the task before us is “to reconceptualize much of what government does and how it does it.”