Actually there is. There is a static method valueOf in the java.sql.Date object which does exactly that. So we have
java.util.Date date = java.sql.Date.valueOf(localDate);
and that's it. No explicit setting of time zones because the local time zone is taken implicitly.
From docs:
The provided LocalDate is interpreted as the local date in the local time zone.
The java.sql.Date subclasses java.util.Date so the result is a java.util.Date also.
And for the reverse operation there is a toLocalDate method in the java.sql.Date class. So we have:
LocalDate ld = new java.sql.Date(date.getTime()).toLocalDate();