SACRAMENTO — Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez (D-Los Angeles) today appointed civil rights attorney Molly Munger to the First Five Commission.

“With her extensive legal background and work with the Advancement Project, Children Now, and other groups committed to servicing the needs of California’s children, Molly Munger will provide an impressive level of expertise to the First Five Commission,” Speaker Núñez said.

Munger, 59, lives in Pasadena and is a partner and civil rights attorney with English, Munger & Rice. She sits on the board of directors of Advancement Project. Previously, she was a federal prosecutor, business litigator, staff attorney with the Los Angeles office of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, partner in the law firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, and president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Federal Bar Association. She received the Women Lawyers of Los Angeles Ernestine Stahlhut Award in 1996 and, with Advancement Project Co-Director Steve English, the ACLU of Southern California’s Equal Justice Advocacy Award in 2002.

Munger is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She serves on the boards of the James Irvine Foundation, Occidental College and Children Now, and is a member of the K-12 Advisory Committee of the Rand Corporation.

The First Five Commission oversees the expenditure of revenues from a 50 cent-per-pack tobacco tax to support smoking prevention and child development programs for children prenatal to age five and their families. The program’s broadly defined goals are to promote, support and improve child development through coordinated programs that emphasize parent education, quality child care, early development, and access to health care services. Members of the commission meet approximately six times a year. The commission was established through the voter-approved California Children and Families Act (Proposition 10) in 1998. There are seven voting members and two ex officio members, and voting members are paid a per diem of $100 and are reimbursed for reasonable expenses for attending meetings and discharging official responsibilities.